You provided a “yet another list if extensions” (from literally hundreds of such lists).
Nearly every single one of those extensions needs to be set up, configured or tweaked in a certain way (the ways differ from extension to extension and how to tweak/configure them can often be found only after some rigorous googling).
And so, you end up with an init.el which is 1500 lines long (which is a magnitude more than some of my standalone production code :) ) or more (I’ve seen some huge monstrosities).
So in my case this led to a sort of fatigue in the end, and I gave up.
I would definitely say that if you're looking for an editor where everything just works to your satisfaction with minimal tweaking, then Emacs is not for you.
I do think you have cause and effect mixed up here. I have customized a lot of stuff because I can. With most other editors/IDEs, I'm stuck. Yes, their configs are much shorter, but only because there is very little to configure over there. I switched to Emacs because with every other editor I used, there was something that really annoyed me and I didn't want to live with it.
>So in my case this led to a sort of fatigue in the end, and I gave up.
You were probably trying to do too much too fast. My init.el evolved over a decade. I'm sure I spent a lot less than 1% of my overall time on Emacs tweaking it. Probably not even 0.1%. I did an initial setup, and started using it for real work. Every so many months, I'd read about a new package and decide to try it out.
>You provided a “yet another list if extensions” (from literally hundreds of such lists).
When you say that, I can tell you're not even trying, given how I explained why this is not just another list of extensions.
To give you an analogy, there are hundreds/thousands of lists out there on productivity apps for Android. Yet you're not going to get even hundreds of different apps listed there. There are hundreds of sites listing the best image editing software, yet that doesn't mean you'll find hundreds of image editing programs listed.
And really, if you feel like you're drowning in those lists, then just don't look at them. I don't read Sacha's Emacs news every week. Life gets busy, and I ignore it for months at a time. Every once in a while, when work is slow, I go to it to see if I can learn something new.
Emacs is a platform. Don't view it as "configuring". View it as installing useful apps. When I first installed Linux, it was "Holy cow! The package manager has so much software!" Saying there are too many packages out there for Emacs is like saying there are too many packages out there for Linux.
Nearly every single one of those extensions needs to be set up, configured or tweaked in a certain way (the ways differ from extension to extension and how to tweak/configure them can often be found only after some rigorous googling).
And so, you end up with an init.el which is 1500 lines long (which is a magnitude more than some of my standalone production code :) ) or more (I’ve seen some huge monstrosities).
So in my case this led to a sort of fatigue in the end, and I gave up.