Suggested initial Emacs config?

Question

I would like to to try Emacs, and want to give it the best chance possible.

To do this, it seems like having a good .emacs file is important.

I prim

Answer 1

That is a hard question. My theory about Emacs is that you have to give it a real honest try. That means working with it for a few months, not days. It is not for the faint of heart! Ideally emacs would become your one and only text editor, and you do things the emacs way.

Really, to give yourself and emacs the best chance possible, you should learn enough elisp to do your own basic customizations.

In fact, I think your .emacs is probably a read herring with regards to giving emacs the best possible chance. Instead, try out some of the groovier features like flymake with pylint, the inferior python process, python debugging with emacs are all worthwhile. In particular inferior processes are the bomb.

EmacsWiki has some good info on python and emacs.