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Keep the defaults until you need something, then you install it.

Trying to make emacs into VS Code in 2025 is as stupid as trying to make emacs into eclipse in 2005 or notepad in 1985.

Modern Emacs has pretty good defaults. Still, to get a much better quality of life, one usually has to manually install magit, treemacs, yasnippet, company-mode, ace-window, vertico + orderless (or similar), relevant programming language modes, and language servers for them.

What you actually mean:

>I have a set of packages I find useful. You may not. Install them anyway and waste 6 months trying to understand how to use things that you don't yet need.

I have a whole set packages and DE improvements I've install/written for literate programming. I don't suggest everyone install noweb and friends for better productivity despite how useful they are.

Literate programming is niche, even more than using Emacs. Using git is mainstream, and magit is considered one of the best git clients ever; some people even install and use Emacs exclusively for running it, not for text editing.

I have Emacs set up like VSCode. I feel it surpasses VSCode, even because it's Emacs.

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