[pxc]

If you're accustomed to vi modes, Doom Emacs is very approachable. LLMs are also surprisingly good with Emacs Lisp, and the official docs and discoverability of Emacs are excellent, so it's pretty easy to get oriented and achieve the configurations you want even if you're not particularly a Lisp fan.

Whatever starter kit you choose, I recommend giving one a go. The experience is really good these days.

[znpy]

I actually got accustomed to vanilla emacs and I am quite satisfied with that choice.

As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive

[pxc]

I'm currently exploring vanilla Emacs through the book _Mastering Emacs_ as well. :D

The last 3-4 releases have really enriched vanilla Emacs (LSP support, tree sitter support, project.el). Emacs adds default packages somewhat conservatively but it seems like everything that gets included by default ends up with very solid integration/support with other packages

> As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive

Quite true, although TRAMP gives Emacs users another good alternative to "bringing the config along"!

> As a sysadmin

I think it's also fair for operators to install the tools they use/like the most on the systems they administer. If a more recent Emacs release makes you happier, why not use Guix to include a portable copy of the latest release on all your servers?