It’s a common complaint that Emacs is hard to configure. After all, you have to learn Elisp and all sorts of other arcana just so you can edit a file. It’s all nonsense, of course. Lots of non-programmers and even profoundly non-technical people use Emacs daily in their work. Some are authors, others come for Org, and some just want an easy way to edit text files.
A fine example is Nuno Salgueiro, who, while not non-technical, is definitely not a programmer but is nevertheless a knowledgeable and effective Emacs user. You can read about his use of Emacs here.
Anyway, my nominee for curmudgeon-of-the-day is precompute who argues that Emacs is not really that hard to configure. It’s nice to have company in the curmudgeon corner.
Precompute argues that you don’t need to know much Elisp to effectively configure Emacs and that it’s better to start with vanilla Emacs and configure it to your liking than it is to use something like Doom.
Many people that I respect are Doom and Spacemacs users and swear by them but I’ve never seen the attraction. I started with vanilla Emacs and built my configuration as I went along. It worked well for me.
As usual, there’s a lot of meat in the comments. Some say that Elisp is a barrier and others dismiss the idea and say that Emacs really is easy to configure.
When I was beginning and didn’t know a lot of Elisp—although I was comfortable with Lisp—I simply searched for the problem I was trying to solve and pasted the solution into my init.el even if I didn’t completely understand it. Now, of course, there’s nothing in my configuration that I don’t completely understand. That’s the point: you start out as a beginner understanding little and evolve to an experienced user with a good command of Emacs and its configuration.