I just want to take this opportunity to once again proselytize the wonderful SPACEMACS, the thing that made me fall in love with Emacs all over again.
For those that haven't used it, it's a carefully designed and polished Emacs kit based around Evil mode (the vi emulation layer).
It's more than just Evil mode (vi emulation). They have a pretty thoughtful way to organize libraries (layers) and a decent solution to the "how to I manage my Emacs config" problem.
Emacs solved that nicely on its own already. Using melpa packages, this is my config: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mkeen/config-emacs/master/...
Pretty simple and doesn't rely on heresy such as evil mode.
Actually, Spacemacs layer configuration uses the use-package add-on ( https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package ) , which helps greatly simplifies and organizes large .emacs config files (and also greatly improves emacs' startup time). use-package was written by John Wiegley, created of the Ledger CLI accounting software, and current maintainer of Emacs. Emacs integration of packages with Melpa gets only a small part of the way towards where Wiegley goes with use-package. . . .