> Even when I switched to Emacs, I hand-picked every line in my configs from looking at a bunch of people's configs and with a lot of random googling to solve t

> Even when I switched to Emacs, I hand-picked every line in my configs from looking at a bunch of people's configs and with a lot of random googling to solve things. Even though it took like 2 weeks of constant tweaking to get just right, I haven't touched it much in like the past 3 years or so, and I've been super productive ever since. This. The key to using Emacs well is to start with something fairly basic. Whenever you find some behavior that annoys you, take a few minutes to figure out how to fix it once and for all in your config. After a few years you will end up with a giant mess of a config that makes Emacs behave almost exactly the way you want, which you can copy over to any machine where you do serious work. You will also be able to get basic work done in a vanilla `/usr/bin/emacs`. FWIW, after several years of zsh, I've been mostly happy with a stock fish in a terminal. It's way less broken by default than either zsh or (ugh) eshell.