If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that we here in the Irreal bunker have never felt the need for a starter kit. A lot of that is probably due to the fact that they weren’t generally available when I moved to Emacs. I just started with an empty config and began adding things—sensible scrolling, C indentation, and a couple of other necessities—right off the bat. Other changes and additions came later.
Those initial changes are instructive. There were, of course, reasonable defaults for all of them, they just weren’t what I wanted and that’s also the problem with starter kits: they have their own idea of the right thing and it may differ from yours.
Still, when you’re starting out it’s nice to have a way of establishing a reasonable initial Emacs environment even if it’s not exactly what you want. If you do that, it’s important, I think, that the starter kit be easily modifiable. A nice example of this is medicated-emacs, a minimal configuration that’s easily adaptable. Take a look. It mostly set’s a few configuration variables and loads a few select packages.
You probably won’t agree with all these choices. I certainly don’t but the thing is, they’re easy to change. The configuration variables were set with the custom package so they’re easy to change if you want to. You may not want all the packages medicated-emacs loads. For instance, I have no need for rust-mode but it doesn’t hurt to have them there in the short term and after you learn a little more about what you’re doing, you can simply remove the package from the config.
If you’re a beginner and think a simple, non-opinionated configuration would be helpful, take a look at medicated-emacs. It will get you going and will be easy to adapt to your evolving needs.