All I want is to be able to use home-directory notation (like ~bdr/.gitignore) in my .gitconfig, so I can use the same config across different machines. Does anyone know how to do this?
I do it by:
1) having a git repository in ~/config that contains, among other things, my global .gitconfig and .gitignore files. This repository is synced across machines.
2) having a .gitconfig in my home directory that's symlinked to config/.gitconfig and similarly for .gitignore.
Yes, that's what I'm already doing. The question is what to put as your core.excludesfile setting in the .gitconfig file.