Yesterday I was helping a friend setting a box with no graphical session: I fired up tmux in the linux virtual terminal and then proceeded to realize without my tmux.conf I couldn't do a thing because I have always been using entirely different keybindings from the default. This is the problem with too much customization. Learning to use the default configuration may be difficult but it's probably worth the effort, for vim it has definitely been in my experience.

I 120% agree.

I once lost my emacs dotfile and suddenly i was almost unable to use Emacs on my own pc.

Since then, i've decided to apply as little customisation as possible to software I use, and read the documentation and learn the standard configuration instead.

For some reasons nowadays it's trendy to add colors, bells and whistles to things but I've found out that learning the standard/default configuration lets me be instantly capable of intervention on whatever machine i put my hands on. Worst case scenario, i can tell programs to ignore configuration files.

Problems with emacs:

* some languages are not included by default * some very good extensions are not included by default also (ace-jump)

ace-jump was a good package.

Now it is superceded by avy (by abo-abo on GitHub) in every way + new features.

For such packages that always have room for improvement and not related to core emacs functionality, it is better that they stay in external repositories on GNU Elpa or Melpa.

That way, older packages do not have to get tied with emacs core. Currently Ido package is in that situation. I used to use Ido, but now I use the ivy package instead. Some people prefer to use helm instead. I would not be affected at all if Ido was removed from the emacs core in future and moved to GNU Elpa.

What is better with avy?

AFAICT it's a superset of ace-jump, with some better thought out commands and better ways to call them.