See it&#x27;s a tough balance. To me, the fun of emacs is getting it exactly as you like and continually optimizing little things. By not having to do SOME painful stuff, you miss out on appreciating the minutia that goes into it. At the same time, many of emacs default settings are very strange so starting with some sanity would be better for newcomers. Maybe some sort of &quot;these are common tweaks that people make right off the bat&quot; page would be the way to go. That way people have to do it themselves (outside of using e.g. spacemacs or prelude) but they have a common place to go to find out about those things. Or at least link to some well known emacs files for developers that code in major languages (a C guy, a Java guy, ...) to give people a place to go to read some elisp and get a feel for what people to do to their editors.