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Spacemacs has decent defaults, is easily extendable, and looks pretty good too.

Yea, I used to maintain a fairly complicated emacs config that I was never quite happy with. Nowadays, I just go with spacemacs. Tired of messing with stuff :)

Similar experience. Not limited to emacs, I used to spend a lot of time to configure my desktop. Nowadays I go with stock XFCE on machines I use occasionally or shared with others and i3 on my main machine. No configurations. In emacs profile I have very few settings to get the indentation required by company style and avoid trailing whitespace / missing newline at the end. That's all.

Your setup sounds exactly like mine. No-config i3 is nice. You might take a look at Regolith Linux, but that's unfortunately built on top of Ubuntu. I run Arch, so this might be useful at some point [0]. I might give it a go on my work laptop.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/regolith-full

I went the opposite way. Used Spacemacs to introduce me to Emacs, and then got rid of it once I got the hang of things, and noticed all the extra packages I don't need that were just impacting (the already poor) Emacs performance.

A few years later, I'm still using my config and wouldn't go back. It's what allows me to make Emacs _mine_, after all. It requires a minimal amount of maintenance, mostly whenever I decide to upgrade the packages.

Is base Emacs performance actually poor? I’ve generally found it to be pretty quick and it performs well in environments that other programs totally fail in, eg in a terminal or over X forwarding.

Well, it depends on your system. In my experience, Emacs without native-comp is way snappier on Linux than on Mac and Windows -- and getting native-comp working is also much easier on Linux, which has a big impact. Large numbers of pixels (high-DPI / Retina displays) can increase stuttering and flickering in the GUI version, in which case performance can improve by using `emacs -nw` in a GPU-accelerated terminal (Kitty/Alacritty), or maybe by switching to a different GUI frontend (e.g. the NS Port vs. Mac Port on MacOS, or the X11 vs. PGTK version on Linux).

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