Guidance here seems to fall into 2 camps - either (1) start vanilla or (2) with one of the currently favoured packagings (Doom, Spacemacs etc). I'd say it depe

Guidance here seems to fall into 2 camps - either (1) start vanilla or (2) with one of the currently favoured packagings (Doom, Spacemacs etc). I'd say it depends on what your aim is: (1) would be the way to go if you primarily want to get fluent with emacs, or are content to use tools you already know for other work, and learn plain emacs gradually in the background. (2) would be best if you want to get productive quickly using emacs for real work, at the risk of a more occluded understanding of emacs per se. I'd put in a word for Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude) as a possible compromise, making emacs immediately usable but without putting many layers between you and it. Some might consider it a little old-fashioned however (no use-package etc). I've used vanilla emacs on and off for many years for quick edits, but only recently for actual programming (using Prelude, and prompted by learning Clojure). It's taking over my computing lifestyle. I've laughed in the past at people using it for email, but found myself using mu4e lately. Scary.