> There are so many plugins and settings that to me feel basic (and thus required), but each one of them add complexity to the learning experience. Yes, and yo

> There are so many plugins and settings that to me feel basic (and thus required), but each one of them add complexity to the learning experience. Yes, and you should be conservative with what you install. There is so much stuff already built into Emacs that can be amazingly helpful if taken seriously. „vc-mode“ e.g. is a great front-end for version control. It works with many systems and only comes with a couple of keyboard short cuts. So you don’t need to learn magit. Or „compile-mode“ which you just have to feed shell scripts to adapt it to any programming language or publishing system you like. Together with „.dir-locals.el“ you make Emacs even switch to the correct build command depending on the source file‘s location. Or take Emacs‘ „xref“ system. It‘s there by default by pressing „M-.“ on a function name. All you need to do is run „etags“ to generate a search index. This way you don’t even need LSP in many contexts. There is also „dired“ which is a great file manager serving many of your dev needs without resorting to extensions like „treemacs“. Emacs also comes with „customize“ to configure the various modes w/o needing to learn Lisp. It’s good enough for many things. Then when you decide you need an extension differentiating the good from the bad extensions is the biggest hurdle for newbies I guess. It does not help that many Emacs influencers play around with cutting edge extensions that look cool on the surface but seldomly are production ready. However, here is the workflow I am following when incorporating new extensions: Most Emacs extensions live on GitHub these days. Usually, before I start installing anything I really need to have an urgent problem to solve. Then I google around ending up in a GitHub repo. Then I check whether the extension is actively maintained and whether it is also provided as a Melpa package. Then I evaluate the quality of the documentation. If it seems simple enough to configure I‘ll try it out in a git branch of my Emacs config. Once I tried it out a couple of hours or even days I merge the changes into „main“. BTW: If you want to learn org-mode try writing your Emacs configuration using it.