Any feedback on the guide will be gratefully received. I'm trying to write better docs to give a little back to the open source community - it's not much but it's what I can manage :)

EDIT: and that "*" for gitignore is intriguing, I'll have to take a better look at that whitelist vs blacklist setup, thank you!

I've been doing "home dir is a repo" for a while now too and I'm always surprised when people think it's weird/dangerous. I wrote a few guides with tricks on how to do it on my blog that all started with "This is probably a horrible idea but here's how to do it anyway!"