[nosequel]

I've been using Emacs for 20 years now, and for the last few years I've trusted most of my setup to Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude). It does a LOT of the tedious setup work most emacs pros would do for themselves. After that, I just make a few modifications to the personal.el file they provide and commit my entire ~/.emacs.d to github. I can't recommend Prelude enough, especially with Helm integrations built into so many parts.

[wtbob]

I'll second the recommendation of prelude. It does one thing I hate (guru-mode, but it documents how to disable it), and it is flakey about a very few things, but in the main it is golden.

I've been using spacemacs at work, and while I absolutely love its layers, I really miss prelude. Something which combined the stability and sanity of prelude with the layers of spacemacs would be just about heaven on earth.