Beware that the trailing slash in the string after `gitdir` is significant! This string is a globbing pattern (it is not obvious at first sight, and seldom mentioned), and the trailing slash implies `**` [1].

So if you type "gitdir:~/work" instead of "gitdir:~/work/", you will lose some time wondering why your configuration is ignored.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#_conditional_includes