Emacs and symbolic links

Question

Say I have a symbolic link at /home/.bashrc that points to an actual .bashrc file somewhere else: /some/other/path/.bashrc that is under a git reposito

Answer 1

When it prompts with

Symbolic link to Git-controlled source file; follow link? (y or n)

type n. Instead of following the symlink and directly opening the file that the symlink points to, emacs will use the symlink itself, as you desire.

A warning: doing this prevents emacs' version control features from detecting and interacting with the repository at the destination, if there is one.

If you'd like to change the default behaviour, check out the documentation of the vc-follow-symlinks customization variable. (C-h v vc-follow-symlinks)