Emacs has a reputation for being borderline unusable out of the box, of being bloated but somehow surprisingly bare. This is largely a discoverability problem1. The solution the Internet has settled on seems to be “Emacs distributions” like Doom, Spacemacs or Prelude that glue together dozens (sometimes hundreds) of addons to deliver a batteries included, finely tuned and user-friendly experience from first launch. While it’s not for me, this does work great 2, and many of these packages will probably make their way into the default Emacs experience in due time.

Guidelines used to populate this list:

  • No packages, stock Emacs only.

  • No steep learning curves. Learn each feature in under two minutes or bust.

  • No gimmicks. No doctor, tetris, snake, dunnet, zone or butterfly.

  • Just the deltas. No commonly mentioned packages like flymake, doc-view, outline-minor-mode or eww/w3m. Nothing that Emacs brings up automatically or a nonspecific Google search gets you.

  • Assume a modern Emacs, 26.3+.