Is there an canonical opinionated configuration of Emacs where each component works relatively well with all others? I love Emacs but I don't want to spend 100 hours on research and tinkering to have something modern.
Additionally, 'EmacsLive' [3] focuses on Clojure support.
[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude
It also helps with integration in Windows. I run Cygwin emacs so that I get sane shell commands. There is no native Win32 version of emacs that also links into Cygwin, as far as I'm aware. I'd have to run the Cygwin X server (or some other X server) in order to get a GUI emacs with working M-| and friends.
I rather struggle to think of a good reason to run Emacs outside a terminal. It gets you more colors and marginally better support for keyboard shortcuts. That's about it; not enough to counter the downsides.
Emacs is much better graphically; it benefits from graphics just like any OS benefits. I could talk about minor improvements while debugging, or I could mention that Emacs can open image and PDF files. This is not the 1970’s when text UI’s were the norm – this is the future, where we do have graphical displays, and all programs should take advantage of them. Living life in an emulated 1970 (which a terminal emulator is) is silly.
A text editor for programming is different. It swims best in a sea of programmable components that can be recombined endlessly. Elisp is one part of that; the shell is another.
I've increasingly isolated my dependency on OSes down to two things, the web browser and the terminal window, both because those are the two things that are consistent and available across all platforms I use - from production servers down to my phone - and because they're the best platforms for what I do.
I know UIs will improve over the next 20 years as they have over the past 20 years. But I also know that I spent a good 18 of the past years using one GUI IDE and editor after the next, and had little compounded return on each iterated investment. Meanwhile, the parallel investment I made in the terminal and the shell has paid off handsomely. I'm no longer pissed off at the crap Apple and MS pull with their OSes, because I'm no longer dependent on them. I spend more and more time in the terminal. Using a world-class editor in the terminal is just another extension of that.
Another thing. I transitioned to using Linux on the desktop fulltime at work last February. That transition would have been much more painful if I hadn't lived inside Cygwin on Windows since 1998 or so. If I had to live with the horrific car crash that is X userland, I doubt I could have lasted as long as I have. I want to have little to do with X as possible. It's a colossal pile of crap. Every app beyond a web browser and terminal emulator is an app too many.
The easiest way of fixing it is a couple of small patches to the broken Ubuntu terminfo entries, and some functions in .emacs to handle everything else.
My own .emacs is the result of nearly 10 years of tinkering, which I (like subsection1h) enjoy. Actually, I probably enjoy it too much, I've spent quite a lot of time procrastinating by tinkering with emacs … and this is why something like Prelude doesn't make sense to me, why would I let someone else do all the tinkering for me? =P
By the way, in my experience most packages tend to stay out of the way of others (e.g. turning on ido everywhere doesn't stop you from using jedi/midnight/sauron/org/magit/etc.), unless they are specific to a certain mode (jedi and ropemacs and traad all try to solve more or less the same problem, ie. python code assistance, so don't run them at the same time).
https://github.com/search?q=Emacs&type=Repositories&s=stars
I haven't used any of these starter kits because the starter kits that I've used for other platforms/frameworks caused me more trouble than they were worth and I generally need to devote only one weekend per year to Emacs tinkering, which I enjoy.