svg-tag-mode VS lambda-emacs

That is a module that let's you replace occurances of regexes with svgs (https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode)

https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode is one ingredient, which makes org documents look more fancy.

You're looking for svg-tag-mode. It's on ELPA and MELPA, so you should be able to just use-package one of those (don't forget to package-refresh-contents).

tag looks like from https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode/tree/07640c97a1dcc305010a384fffdaa7788c342da7

I agree, that's a really great example. It would be even more natural for tags in org-mode, which already supports drawing tags away from the text itself to a far-right column, but they really could be moved in the other direction to the left of a hairline next to the bullets, and they'd be more readable.

BTW, Nicolas has a lot of interesting packages exploring use of graphical design elements in Emacs apart from the Nano Emacs stuff; for example, there's https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode. I love how he chooses to represent dates and dates with times attached, and to distinguish active vs. inactive dates with shading rather than "[" and "<". That actually makes it easier to spot a common org-mode mistake without having to call up the agenda.

It's here: https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode/blob/main/examples/example-2.el (just evaluate the whole buffer)

Specifically this is the one: https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode

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.