One of the frequent complaints you hear about Emacs—generally from people who don’t know what they’re talking about—is that it’s unusable out of the box. I know that’s not true because when I started using Emacs about 13 years ago it was plain old vanilla Emacs without any packages. My first customization was to change the default C-style from kernel style to (I guess) BSD style and I didn’t tweak it much after that for some time. After a while, all that changed, of course, but I was reasonably productive with vanilla Emacs and only slowly made it mine with customizations and packages (my current init.el is 2312 lines long).
It’s a commonplace among Emacs users that you never learn it all and are always discovering something new. After a decade and a half that doesn’t happen as often as it used to so I was surprised by Karthik Chikmagalur’s post, Batteries Included With Emacs. Chikmagalur agrees with me and lists of some little-known, built-in features that he uses. My surprise stems from the fact that I didn’t know about several of the features he lists.
Have you ever heard of pulse? Or View Mode? Or upcase-dwim and downcase-dwim? I hadn’t and there were some others too. Take a look at Chikmagalur’s post. If you know every feature he discusses, you can count yourself an Emacs Wizard.