What's a good config for someone coming from Windows?

As the title suggests, I'm a primarily-Micro$oft user who's trying to get into the old ways of emacs and terminal. I know the vim bindings for navigation and very basic editing, and have those set up in Visual Studio on my work computer. I've heard about "[emacs pinky](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey)" and would like to avoid that (cramping is part of why I got into the vim bindings instead of the default Microsoft ones), but I don't know if I should go full Evil mode, especially when I'm not tied to the more advanced vim stuff. What's your favorite noob starter kit, especially if it simplifies the navigation commands?

You want Doom Emacs.

You might like this... it's written for Windows users: https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam It's a work in progress, but the defaults suggested are good.

I highly recommend using wsl2 Ubuntu. You will encounter much less issues if just using emacs on raw Windows 10. Plus its significantly faster running on top of wsl2. So yeah doom emacs under wsl2 is probably the best starting option.

> I've heard about "emacs pinky" and would like to avoid that Use the right ctrl key, fixed.

I do not recommend that. I personally switched on my laptop from Linux back to Windows due to hardware and software incompatibilities. Because I still wanted to use Linux, I decided to go with Windows 11 but the path Microsoft is taking makes me very uncomfortable. Additionally, WSL2 doesn't cut it for me, because it renders the Emacs frame not adjusted to my HDPI screen. I would recommend to stay on Windows 10 and use Emacs on Windows. I personally have zero problems and with MINGW2 in the environment variables it can do most things. The only thing that might bother a few is the long startup time. I often wait up to 30 seconds. Until last week I used a self compiled version, but because I start Emacs through Start, I decided use a precompiled binary from [gnu alpha](http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/emacs-29/).

https://github.com/redguardtoo/emacs.d I'm using Windows 10 now.

Use doom emacs! With doom emacs, you barely need to press control key. But still if you feel like you need to press it a lot, you can rebind your caps lock key to control, which a ton of people do.

100% doom emacs. I switched from vim and it made the transition seamless.