[nonrecursive]

I might be biased (I'm the author), but I don't think that emacs-starter-kit prevents you from doing things the normal way. You can still modify your emacs config and include vendor elisp, and ESK doesn't make it more difficult.

And with the tutorial - I have a pretty low opinion of it. I mean, it starts out talking about how to navigate up and down one screen - who cares about that when they're starting to learn a new editor? Who? Emacs already has a reputation for being obscure and difficult, and the tutorial does not help.

This frustration isn't directed at you, of course - I appreciate the comment. In general, though, I think that Emacs instructions would be better if they had a little more empathy for the learner. As a new person, I don't care about hearing all this magical stuff about emacs right off the bat - I can't even make sense of it because I have no context. Just show me how to actually do real work.

[asgard1024]

Yes, original tutorial and Emacs configuration is a bit obscure, for historical reasons. That's understandable.

Another thing I struggled with was some hints how to actually write and structure your own configuration files. For example, is it good to use the configuration inside Emacs? Where this section should go into the config? I had issues figuring out how to load packages etc. In what order should configuration be specified? What if I use multiple computers, can I share parts of configuration? Etc.

Similar for keybindings. What keybinding can I use for my private stuff that are unlikely to conflict with other things?

[goblinfoblin]

That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go.

The tutorial is more of a get you started and make sure you can actually edit text in emacs.

The most important parts of the tutorial are the how to save (which most people get to) and getting more help which is probably what people don't get to or understand. It isn't the best thing but it is okay if people make it through the end.

But you're right if you don't want to mess with your editor and `learn` emacs go for a starter kit or go for another editor with bells and whistles included.

[asgard1024]

"That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go."

I disagree. It's not true for most IDEs, why should it hold for Emacs? This argument was also raised about Linux, but then Ubuntu came along and proved it was wrong. This seems to me like a religious stupidity - you have to use it for everything or it won't work at all.

My main motivation to use Emacs is org-mode and Common Lisp. That's already real work; although I try to use Emacs for everything, but using it for just one of these things would be perfectly valid use case for many people.

It's not that I wouldn't like to mess with the editor either; in fact I did a lot. But it still was not enough for it to work decently. I will have to try one of the starter packages yet (probably Prelude), though.