Copying the setup of an emacs guru sounds like a great idea to me. Think of it as using a Linux distro instead of building your own Linux from scratch. What tur

Copying the setup of an emacs guru sounds like a great idea to me. Think of it as using a Linux distro instead of building your own Linux from scratch. What turned me off of emacs as my daily driver, after using it from college through the first ten years of my career, was the large number of packages that came highly recommended by the community but which were half-baked or required debugging and subtle adjustments to coexist with other packages. When the author says: > Don’t try to be “creative” at this stage. What he means by that is that if you try to configure emacs yourself, without yet being a master, half of the functionality you try to use will be broken, and you'll spend countless hours reading code and figuring out how to fix your broken setup. This is the traditional way to master emacs: by going back and forth between writing your own modifications and struggling to incorporate other people's code. Tackle every challenge head-on, and solve them one by one to make emacs do what you need. The daily effort to do turns you into an emacs master, like turning the wheel of pain turned the boy Conan into a 1970s bodybuilder. I don't think that's a wise or attractive route for new emacs users today. Nowadays, everything I could do in emacs I can do with other freely available software as well, and I have to ask myself whether it makes more sense to invest the time figuring out how to do it in emacs, or to install an easier and more polished special-purpose tool. When my workflow revolved entirely around emacs, it made sense to make the extra effort. But over time my workflow fragmented, until the extra effort never made sense, and my emacs setup stopped growing. Copying the setup of somebody who has already invest the time to get everything working together sounds like a nice compromise.