solarized-emacs VS .emacs.d

I can confirm that the name of theme is solarized-selenized-white which included in solarized-theme.

Solarized Light (with Noto Sans Mono)

There is no reason to watch videos, it will be self-explanatory when you use it; you can't miss it. Once you have three or more windows in Emacs it will show you a number, just press the number, and it will switch to the window. If you install a nice theme that has theming for ace-window, such Batsov's Solarized (or any of other derivatives), you will get nice theming for those numbers, so they stick out too.

The first one looks like a version of solarized. I think I have seen some other screenshots of him using something similar to Solarized dark, but I don't know for sure. At least I see Batsov's solarized forked on his account.. I don't know if he has done any changes, I think he did, since his color scheme does not look same as mine, and I use same theme unchanged from Batsov. Those other themes can be just different color schemes that comes together with Batsov's port of Solarized (zenburn, etc).

Everything feels quite well integrated to me. I also use Solarized by Batsov which minimizes the rainbow of colours that some packages introduce, notably. Most of the time I use two windows side by side in Emacs, so *-dwim commands can auto guess when I copy/move some file.

For the looks, if you don't like built-in themes, I suggest you some of Batsov's themes. I am using his Solarized port, and I recommend it because he has gone to great lengths to customize external packages, which can give you a more uniform look with third party packages out of the box. You don't need to use the solarized color scheme, there are other color schemes included there. It might help you with looks of tabs. I don't use tabs myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if he has taken care of tabs look too.

That's how a lot of themes work. Bozhidar Batsov's version of Solarized has a slightly different approach to file organization:

In my Helm, I have to actively choose the candidate to confirm it. So I can type in both paths that are shorter or longer then existing ones. I even made a video to demonstrate it, the thread was relatively recently up I think. My Helm setup is here it if helps you, find Helm in the list of packages.

I also use Helm, and I have no problems. Just keep typing, once you typed a letter that does not exist in a path name it will stop completing. I don't know if I have some special option enabled/disabled; I don't think you need it, but you can see my Helm config (just scroll down untill you find "Helm").

When all deps are installed,my config is over 200 packages. On my Arch Linux desktop I built in 2016, with i7 4.6k (haswell) it starts ~0.7 secs, but init time will be anything between 0.5 ~ 0.8 secs, i guess depending on what system does. So all things same, init time will vary.

I am using it in my literate org-config. If you scroll down, there is a big list of packages, and I have done a small wrapper around helm-imenu, to jump to a package configuration. Looks like this.

That does not work for completions, at least not for me. It works for keymaps, so you can have mode specific (or really any) keymap in src blocks. I have been using his method myself in my init file generator for quite a while now. If you (or anyone) knows/have an idea how to expand it for completions and eldoc, I would be really happy to hear.

I don't know what if it is more robust but I use more or less plain dired with just some options turned on to make it less noisy to look at, but I don't "manage" my files so much to be honest. I do use some extras from dired-hacks, and my own dired-auto-readme, but that is about it. You can check my setup if you wish, look at "dired" under packages and in Lisp folder for "dired-extras.el".

I personally put all custom lisp in a special directory and scrape autoloads myself. If you are curious, you can check under "generator", functions generate-autoloads and collect-autoloads, but there is nothing special, just plain text search and copy-paste programmatically. I don't recommend to use it though.