I just ran into this issue myself. It seems like you can set the ignore-path to an empty string and it will work.

npx prettier . --write --no-config --ignore-path ''

Same problem here. I guess I'll have to live without formatting for now for my specific use case. Or rather forever if I'm waiting on prettier to solve this.

Nonsense; it takes very little responsibility to wield properly and prettier won't (or shouldn't) make any non-formatting changes anyhow. It's very easy to manually diff to see what changes, if any, at the end of the debugging session need to land upstream or continue as patches. Besides, you can't avoid editing node_modules in most scenarios, module resolution is what it is and node_modules is the magic directory for making that all happen.

If you've done any serious maintenance or debugging work you'd surely know this.

Sure, if you're very carefully and deliberately making patches to a specific project it's not that hard because presumably you already have made a copy of the original files to diff with (though in that case it's much better to just check out the repo for that project assuming it's open source or a repo you already have access to; and link it in using yalc publish and yalc add, that way you can see the changes with git diff continually and just make a commit when you're done).

But I was thinking more about randomly navigating into a 3rd party file and make changes to debug stuff; and it's definitely not "nonsense" that it's easy to accidentally make changes you forget or fail to revert properly when doing so, especially if you're ADHD like me or just unexperienced. It's definitely much easier to track what you've changed if you only change files that are indexed by git. Of course making a manual copy still requires you to notice that you have navigated into node_modules but at least having that as a personal policy reduces the chance that you become habituated to making changes directly inside node_modules on purpose.

Really there should be some way of write protecting node_modules somehow without making it inaccessible for the npm command (the most obvious way would have been if npm always ran as a different unix user, so files could be drwxr-xr-x and owned by npm), so that you can't accidentally make changes there when navigating to source (option+click, at least with my keyboard setup in vscode) not realising it has jumped into node_modules. That's when I've personally modified things in node_modules by accident most often... fortunately I tend not to habitually close files too often so the changed files are usually still in an open tab; though I have had to completely delete node_modules a few times, when I realise I must have changed something in a local copy days ago and the same branch suddenly doesn't behave the same on a different checkout of the repo. And that happened much more often before I decided to never deliberately modify node_modules. (Sorry I'm getting off topic, as I said ADHD 😅 )