This is a mashup of stuff I've learned and/or played with in terms of Git client configuration.  It's not a recipe as each scenario seems to be different for me - sometimes corporate laptop, sometimes not.   Sometimes Linux or macOs and other times Windows.  My workflow is always changing too.  But here's a cheatsheet of stuff.

Windows

When running on Windows, I typically want to use BeyondCompare as my difftool and the visual editor is preferable:

choco install beyondcompare -y

git config --global merge.tool bc
git config --global difftool.bc.path "c:/Program Files/Beyond Compare 4/bcomp.exe"

A great lightweight text editor that is perfect as a git editor is notepad2:

choco install notepad2 -y
git config --global core.editor notepad

Note notepad is now notepad2 - it overwrites the existing build-in (crappy) notepad app.

HTTP

Yeah this is awful, but sometimes you're in a pinch working on a git server with self-signed certs over HTTP and you need to get the damn thing to stop validating because you can't figure out how to get the cert trust setup correctly:

git config --global http.sslVerify false