Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogether.
Exactly. Ironically, Emacs is also the place where transition from tourist to resident is the smoothest. You can stray writing and evaluating Elisp practically anywhere. (Almost) Everything is programmable via Elisp, everything is documented in excruciating detail, learning about any system attribute is two keychords away, there are debugging and profiling tools built in, and source code for very built in thing is available. If the target is to make average Joe into a programmer with least effort, things don't get much better than this.
My advice for those seeking to get into Emacs: start from scratch. Learn how to split your custom.el from your init.el, and make sure you're using git to manage those files. Then start slowly and install org-mode from source and go from there:
8 │ ;; Save customizations in a different file. Prevents this file being
9 │ ;; modified by Emacs.
10 │ ;;; Code:
11 │ (setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory))
12 │ (when (file-exists-p custom-file)
13 │ (load custom-file))
14 │
15 │ ;; Before anything else, orgmode:
16 │ (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.orgsrc/org-9.4/lisp")
17 │ (require 'org-loaddefs)
18 │
19 │ ;; First off, we need MELPA and the org-mode repo:
20 │ (require 'package)
21 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)
22 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t)
23 │ (package-initialize) 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/11/my-system-is-foobar/
53 │ ;; Check if system is GNU/Linux
54 │ (defun my-system-type-is-gnu ()
55 │ "Return non-nil if system is GNU/Linux-based."
56 │ (string-equal system-type "gnu/linux")
57 │ )
59 │ ;; make Linux a bit more mac-like
60 │ (when (my-system-type-is-gnu)
61 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-/") 'comment-or-uncomment-region-or-line)
62 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-<backspace>") '(lambda () (interactive) (kill-line 0)))
64 │ )
362 │ (defun newer-than-7-days(file)
363 │ "Return list of files newer than 7 days old in directory FILE."
364 │ (> 7
365 │ (/(float-time(time-subtract
366 │ (current-time)
367 │ (nth 5 (file-attributes file))))
368 │ 86400)))
407 │ (setq org-agenda-files
408 │ (seq-filter #'newer-than-7-days
409 │ (directory-files-recursively "~/Org/Journal" "\\.org$")))
I use emacs-mac with spacemacs which works pretty well out of the box. What I try to do, to not go into the "hacking Emacs" rabbit hole, is to really avoid tweaking it unless something is really interfering with my workflow.