The obvious point is that everyone disagrees about &quot;settings that look silly to have turned off by default&quot;.<p>A lot of modern software uses the &#x27;opinionated&#x27; approach. The designers come up with their preferred way of using the software product, and build the user experience around that. This gives great results a lot of the time - you get a consistent and unsurprising experience and you can build a very intuitive experience. To pick a silly example of this, Google Chrome tries very hard to prevent the expansion of extra &#x27;settings&#x27;. That way everyone is using the browser in the same way (this has security benefits too).<p>Emacs goes completely the other way. It gives you the tools to tweak absolutely every aspect of your usage, and while it may have some defaults it isn&#x27;t really opinionated about which is right. It&#x27;s been said many times - emacs isn&#x27;t a text editor, it&#x27;s a platform on which developers can build their own ideal text editor.<p>That isn&#x27;t to say that there aren&#x27;t some silly things in the defaults, but the emacs developers appear to continue to actively tweak the defaults in the direction of being ever more sensible.