> I found simple setup effective
> my config is now ~4000 lines
We have critical production services which are a magnitude of lines fewer than your "simple config".
There's a reason I linked my own init.el: I'm not talking about something I have no idea about. It's quite short and quite extensively documented. And even there you see: somethign is set as global vars, something is buffer local args, something is inited through hooks, something is inited through hooks and then thorough a global var (doesn't work the other way around), something requires a lambda for a config, something requires a list of values, something is inited through a macro, some are just elisp macros you have to write yourself. And so on and so on.
Once you start extending emacs to be your personal programming environment (especially a multi-language environment), you'll run into exactly what I'm talking about: it's not a simple system. There are the often arcane ways of configuring emacs itself, and then there are often arcane ways to configure the modes and packages. And often these are undocumented, or specific ways to configure them are passed down in oral tradition from one init.el to another.
Even in this post you see multiple people recommending not just differenet packages, but different combinations of packages (each has to be configured separately).
And when something goes wrong? Good luck figuring it out.
That's why I use org-mode for my config so I can set :tangle no anytime, with {use,req}-pacakge I can handle the complexity without feeling it.
Actually I live (in IT terms) in Emacs, from the WM (EXWM(-x)) to MUA (notmuch-emacs) to personal finance (ledger-mode) to document system (skeletor+org+LaTeX+yasnippet) to programming environment (personal use of guile (geiser), hy, python (jedi etc), nim and various shells/DSL language), I administer systems inside Emacs with NixOS and tramp+eshell, I forget the concept of filemanger with dired (and tons of related addons), I super reduce CLI usage thanks to various Emacs packages, I have chat, rss, news all inside all well integrated... Yep, the start give me some frustration, I have a config bankrupt but after that things goes far smother than any other environment I have ever tried.
And yes, the config is big, but I do not made it before starting using Emacs, it evolve regularly in the time as I need so it's length and complexity have essentially no weigh. When something goes wrong (essentially after an update) I simply rollback and keep working until I have time to investigate. No real interruption, nothing like Windows update during presentation we all have seen.
Sometimes I have encountered "strange" bugs, the last few days ago that doom-modeline break notmuch-mua-new-mail: I quickly rollback and do my stuff; in a moment of free time I try to figure out what happen and yes I encounter some difficulties (my knowledge of elisp it's not well enough) so I simply ignore the problem. Yesterday I update again and the problem was gone. Long-story short in many case a problem is not only mine and tons of people working on Emacs find and debug it :-)
My complaint: emacs requires a lot of configuration that is often arcane or poorly documented.
You: but it's so simple! I only use notmuch-emacs, and ledger-mode, and skeletor+org+LaTeX+yasnippet, and geiser, and jedi, and tramp+eshell, and dired with tons of related addons, and..., and..., and..., and...
Something tells me you just reinforce the point I'm making. I personally have a life outside of looking for and configuring dozens of emacs packages in a hundred different ways.
I never quite got that. What is the advantage of doing everything on your PC with Emacs plugins, instead of using dedicated programs for specific tasks? I get that the text editor for all these tasks is behaving the same way when going the Emacs way - is that the only advantage though?
This is exactly what keeps happening to my emacs. I have tried emacs in 3 or 4 periods for work and home use. Every time, I add useful things to my config until something breaks, I try fix it and maybe fail or partially fix it.
I eventually give up. Latesty try was with spacemacs, which I quite liked. It gots so broken it refused to start up and I never even really bothered fixing it. I tried VS Code and that is where I am at.
Now my VS Code is getting slow, and Iv'e already had some problems extensions!
I have experienced far in the past a similar situation, I've tried both Emacs and XEmacs at that time and give up sticking to vim. After, time ago pushed by curiosity and few demos I casually see I tried Emacs again but with a far slower start, only as a side curiosity and a step at a time I grow my config keep using (n)vim until I decide it's time to jump. After that I still experience some problems but I keep evolution speed slow to avoid frustration, in few months Emacs became my environment.
Maybe you have tried Emacs as an editor expecting to been able to use it quickly as other "editors" you already encounter and that cause the fail. Emacs is an OS, not an editor, an ancient one that have some idiosyncrasy because of that vestige. And we know that learning an OS is not as simple as learning a single-purpose application.
We have critical production services which are a magnitude of lines fewer than your "simple config".
There's a reason I linked my own init.el: I'm not talking about something I have no idea about. It's quite short and quite extensively documented. And even there you see: somethign is set as global vars, something is buffer local args, something is inited through hooks, something is inited through hooks and then thorough a global var (doesn't work the other way around), something requires a lambda for a config, something requires a list of values, something is inited through a macro, some are just elisp macros you have to write yourself. And so on and so on.
Once you start extending emacs to be your personal programming environment (especially a multi-language environment), you'll run into exactly what I'm talking about: it's not a simple system. There are the often arcane ways of configuring emacs itself, and then there are often arcane ways to configure the modes and packages. And often these are undocumented, or specific ways to configure them are passed down in oral tradition from one init.el to another.
Even in this post you see multiple people recommending not just differenet packages, but different combinations of packages (each has to be configured separately).
And when something goes wrong? Good luck figuring it out.