speed-of-thought-lisp VS .emacs.d

Try speed of thought lisp and see if you like it, or yasnippet. I think it is great, I can just type acronym (actually could be any abbrev) and space and it completes, however I dislike the fact that it requires me to remember acronyms. But I do use it for some of the more usual stuff like with-current-buffer is wcb, require is r and so on.

Paredit, Speed-of-thought lisp, Helm, perhaps Lispy but I am not using it myself. I found expand-region to work really well when writing and modifying elisp. lisp-extra-font-lock if you want some more blink (and font-lock-studio). Helpful is very good to have instead of built-in help, it displays the source code by default as well as symbol properties. It is a very informative learning experience to see how built-in stuff is implemented. I am quite lazy to press extra in built-in help to see the source code, but with Helpful, you get it auto in the same window, whicih is great for learning. Seeing symbol properties is sometimes a time saver so you don't have to M-: and type an Elisp function to see the symbol properties when debugging. Learn Edebug, it is very useful built-in application for Emacs Lisp development.

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.