I started using Emacs seriously in 2016 with Spacemacs, and loaded it up with layers bringing in all sorts of functionality.
Spacemacs was generally a great experience, but pretty slow. This wasn't really Spacemacs' fault - in work at the time I was using Emacs on a Windows laptop, or on Linux machines with NFS mounted home directories. Neither of these environments is great for a setup that needs to lazy-load many packages that consist of small elisp files. Windows also has some challenges, with some of the eye-candy packages really affecting the responsiveness of the editor. I played around with Spacemacs configs quite a lot in my evenings. After a while I moved to other editors for coding (mainly Python and C), and kept a small Spacemacs config for pretty much only org-mode things.
I came back to Emacs properly when I changed jobs and was working almost entirely on Linux machines. This time around I started from hzenginx/spacelite, a repo on GitHub with an emacs config that has spacemacs type bindings. I've gradually stripped things out of this, and added other stuff to arrive at dctrud/spacelite - my messy, and evolving config.
Here are a few of the nice packages out there I'm using now:
https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/
Deft provides an interface to quickly browse, find, and create notes. I have it setup to work with an ~Org/notes~ directory where I put long-form notes in individual ~.org~ files. I have ~deft~ bound to ~f8~ globally so I can jump into note-taking or find past notes easily. The screencast gives a good idea of what it's about.
https://gitlab.com/jessieh/mood-line
I've gone back to using stock emacs themes, either the default or 'adwaita' and like the old-fashioned grey look. The stock modeline is very ugly, though, and not very practical.
Having jumped around more complicated options I came across the minimal mood-line. It's very simple (and therefore fast) but contains all the stuff I want to see.
https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode
lsp-mode is what made it possible for me to move back to Emacs again, and stay there happily. I work with Go, and as the language has changed toward Go modules the slightly poor experience with ~go-mode~ using various CLI tools for refactoring etc. became more broken. The ~gopls~ language server now really has to be used for nice completion, syntax checking, etc.
I'd played with ~lsp-mode~ before, but it was buggy and quite slow. Now that the Emacs 27 pre-releases have optimized JSON handling it has become very smooth and quick. It's also seems very reliable these days.
If you haven't been impressed with lsp-mode in the past, it's definitely worth grabbing an Emacs 27 pre-test build and trying out the latest lsp-mode from Melpa.
