If you're having font problems in gvim, see here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/The_perfect_programming_font
  Solution is to cd to ~/.fonts and run fc-cache

The .gitconfig should instead be .git/info/exclude (so you don't exclude everything from all repos IN home), and should look as follows

* # exclude everything
!.* # include all dotfiles
# exclude all dotfiles that you don't want to version
!.vim/*
!.vim
!*.vim
!README