castlemacs VS kickstart.el

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs but it wasn't good since it's not actually Emacs - you need to learn entirely new stuff on top of Emacs stuff. In the end I gave up and settled with IntelliJ IDEA for Scala development. In five years I returned to Emacs, but started from very simple Castlemacs distribution, learning the meaning of each line, copying to my config only settings I needed, mostly related to configuring Emacs to behave properly on macOS. I don't bother with Doom Emacs, my startup time of 3 seconds doesn't bother me.

I started from this https://github.com/freetonik/castlemacs, it's not been updated for a few years, but a good starting point if you're on macOS.

https://github.com/freetonik/castlemacs is the approach where I finally understood and was the missing tutorial for mac users. I've done the emacs embedded tutorial, but got stuck at that weird usage of ESC key as Meta key. That repo laid down the bridgework to me being comfortable with emacs. Still very sparse, but getting there!

Lower the barrier to entry, maybe give them your configuration or some sort of starter-kit, I think castlemacs is good choice as it is quite simple and useable. Tell them to fork it on Github and use it.

I think IJKL keys are probably better then arrow keys, see how castlemacs does it.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/erikbackman/kickstart.el - Very minimal with sane defaults - Plug management with lazy loading but does not use separate files as I find it pointless myself.

I recently put together a small moderately documented one for random people I know: https://github.com/erikbackman/kickstart.el