Remember how, when you first started using Emacs, there were all those strange defaults that just didn’t seem right. The worst one, for me, was scrolling. I hated the way the screen would jump when you got near the top or bottom. That feature alone caused me to abandon Emacs more than once.
Of course, like everything in Emacs, that’s configurable but it’s hard for n00bs to know what to do about such things. Sooner or later we all discovered the magic spells to get things more to our liking.
Over at The Emacs Cat, there’s a nice post that shows how to configure things in what many of us consider a saner way. Decent scrolling is covered as is making Emacs Emacs talk UTF-8 exclusively. Both of those took me a long time and a lot of experimentation to get right.
There’s also a section on getting rid of the common annoyances such as having to type “yes” instead of simply “y”, making tabs sane, getting rid of the bell and tool bar, and—for those of you who love controversy—ending sentences with a period and single space.
There’s also a section on some useful modes that you can enable, such as winner-mode, global-hl-line-mode, desktop-save-mode, and help-window-select. I didn’t know about that last one but I’ve frequently been annoyed that I have to switch over to the Help window so it seems useful.
There are a few more useful tweaks that you may or may not want. I found it surprising how closely Emacs Cat’s choices echoed mine. We don’t agree on everything but it’s surprising how much we do agree on. In any event, take a look and see if there’s an answer to a problem you’re having.