lambda-emacs VS exec-path-from-shell

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.

I'm not a Mac user, but FWIW from what I've seen over time https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell is a must when using Emacs on a Mac. I don't know why this is, but I'm guessing there's something unusually difficult about setting up the desktop session environment when using OSX, and users end up needing to resort to this. Hopefully that helps if you run into environment issues.

Check out the package exec-path-from-shell

This package may help: https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

All my path related problems with emacs were solved with the package: https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

For one, do you use the exec-path-from-shell package? That should do the trick for path issues when using Emacs vterm. It's likely when emacs is loading it's not correctly loading in the $PATH values from your system. You can check the path values in emacs by checking the value of exec-path.

I would like to use SPC p p RET to switch projects, change working directories to trigger exec-path-from-shell, and open Treemacs with the only active project being the selected one.

I suspect the Emacs.app package has some misconfigured paths that are unable to find my libgccjit library, which I've installed via homebrew. I've tried experimenting with exec-path-from-shell to ensure Emacs is aware of my shell paths, but to no avail.