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You'd expect more intelligent people to prefer a tool that doesn't require days of tuning to start being remotely usable though

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Jokes aside, definitely not a day's worth of tuning.

My minimal set-up is mostly hiding all the GUI elements. Though I also make a semi-virtue out of trying to use as much vanilla Emacs as possible, for this very reason.

If you know your way around it, there's a lot of power in unmodded Emacs still.

Stuff like electric pairs, rainbow delimeters, rjsx-mode, prettier, and neotree are really all I use. I started using emacs because of auctex writing my master's thesis, and ended up switching from vim because of the experience. Once you know the basics about packaging (enabling melpa) and setting a comfortable theme you're pretty much ready to roll.

Prefacing with that I don't think iq is the best way to measure intelligence, but I wonder what the intelligence distribution of tinkerers is. The sort of person who might sit down to learn emacs because it's a blank functional canvas that you can customize to meet your particular needs.

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