Is it possible to have 2 git repositories in one directory? I'd think not, but thought I'd ask. Basically, I'd like to check in my home directory config files (e.g. .emacs) which should be common across all of the machines I work on, but have a second repository for local files (e.g. .emacs.local), which contains machine-specific configurations. The only way I can think of to do that is to have the local config in a subdirectory and ignore that subdirectory from the main git repository. Any other ideas?
If I understand what you're doing, you can handle it all in one repository, using separate branches for each machine, and a branch containing your common home directory config files.
Initialize the repo and commit the common files to it, perhaps renaming the MASTER branch as Common. Then create a separate branch from there for each machine that you work with, and commit machine-specific files into that branch. Any time that you change your common files, merge the common branch into each of the machine branches and push to your other machines (write a script for that if there are many).
Then on each machine, checkout that machine's branch, which will also include the common config files.