lambda-emacs VS corfu

You might look at crafted emacs and my own lambda-emacs (not sure if either of these are properly classified as "distros" though). Both default to vanilla Emacs bindings. The repo for lambda-emacs also has a bunch of links to some other great vanilla configs like Prelude, etc.

I am a professor in the humanities (philosophy) and I maintain a framework for Emacs (I don’t know if it rises to the level of “distro”) that is conducive to humanities work, including writing, notes, citations, a good ui, and basic programming. I’m happy to say more if you have any questions. https://github.com/Lambda-Emacs/lambda-emacs

See my lambda-emacs and lambda-themes. They are meant for writing and readability.

7 - Meow: Meow is great. I switched from evil a few months ago and am pretty happy with it. I also dropped general.el for bind-key.el, which is included with use-package (which I see you are using anyway). You can look at my setup of meow here and a more generic setup of keybindings here. I haven't had any trouble with using this instead of general.

You could try corfu. It has auto-completion disabled by default and works most places with M-Tab. Or you could set a longish corfu-auto-delay (0.75s say), and let auto popup only when you stop to ponder a while.

Corfu supports this. Or at least it allows you to move completions to the mini buffer which I find quiet useful.

A substantial section of the community is using corfu instead of company, but I wouldn't say company is out of date by any means. In emacs 29 eglot will be a built in, which might act as a replacement for lsp-mode depending on what functionality you need.

Wow, interesting that my response is getting down voted. It seems not enough that I give away my work for free. Nevertheless I appreciate support from the community, as other Emacs package developers. The support is actually helpful. To clarify, publishing my configuration would translate into quite a bit of work, requiring separation of private and public bits.

I am currently using evil and corfu, but I want to configure such that pressing a single escape will invoke corfu-quit when its UI is active (because pressing "C-g" is harder).

A few days ago I found an unexplained slowness when using Corfu on Emacs 29 with pgtk. I stripped my configuration to basically just Corfu, and still had a noticeable delay. Maybe it is related to your problem. https://github.com/minad/corfu/issues/307

The most straight forward solution is probably the package company-math. (that's what I use but with corfu and cape)

See here: https://github.com/minad/corfu/issues/231