Will Schenk has a post that may interest some of you. It’s about setting up a new Emacs instance. It’s not that he’s a n00b; he just wants to set up a nice clean instance. You can argue with his choice of themes and the packages that he chooses but the post is handy nonetheless.
He starts with installing emacs-plus from Homebrew along with the Roboto fonts. Then he disables package.el in favor of straight.el. Lots of folks have abandoned the default package.el in favor of straight.el or one of the other alternatives but I’ve never felt the need. The default system works well for me and I don’t need the pain of worrying about another package to wrangle my packages. Still, straight.el appears to be a good choice if you do feel the need for another package manager.
Next, he installs Org and counsel. Those are pretty much mandatory and I definitely agree with those choices. The last major decision is to install the Nano theme. I don’t use any theme, preferring to simply set my background to a light tan (oldlace) and otherwise use the Emacs defaults. I’ve been doing that for years and have never felt the need to change. But lots of people love Nano so if you’re looking for theme, you should take a look at it.
Schenk installs some other packages so be sure to take a look at his post to see what he’s decided on.