I've been using #Emacs for the last couple of months now for all my daily work (I'm a translator, not a programmer) and here's a thought.
Of course, I stumbled upon rather contrasting recommendations:
1) Don't use vanilla, use #DoomEmacs or #Spacemacs. Preferably Doom. Well, I tried this in the past, but it didn't stick. It''s everything and the kitchen sink, but you generally don't know if you really need all this. So you study Doom, not Emacs. I might get back to it in the future. I did prefer Spacemacs, though (aesthetically).
2) Use vanilla and spend ten years building your own config. This sounds fairly reasonable, because you naturally learn the program itself, not its plugins. But it's a huge timesink when you start to "build your own Emacs". So you'd end up with DoomEmacs, but badly written, slow and constantly breaking on every update.
I went with the second alternative and here's what I got for my personal usecase:
me@desktop:~$ grep "use-package" .emacs.d/init.el | wc -l
8
Eight packages. howm, inkpot-theme, which-key, avy, counsel, general, annotate, markdown-mode. I didn't even bother to make annotate work for now, so it's 7. And I don't really use avy, so it could be 6.
That's all I need for now. For several months I haven't had a moment yet when I thought that I need something else or that my workflow is getting somewhat cumbersome.
Of course, this doesn't mean that my setup is perfect. But my point is: configuring your own Emacs could be way easier than you might think (depending on the workflow), and you probably don't need to fight a bazillion packages waging civil war in your config file.
Main purpose would be to learn Linux, Web, writing MarkDown and Org, zettlekasten organisation, etc...
