Try something like Doom Emacs if you'd like those features off the shelf.
Since I'm looking to "learn" Emacs I'd love to start with Vanilla and add in things as required as you would with any other editor. Starting with something like Doom makes it near impossible to untangle what is coming from where and trim down to exactly what you want, which is sort of the point of using Emacs in the first place.
thankfully though, most of the stuff that you want to do are just a google search away these days, and presence of declarative package-managers f.e. use-package, straight etc. does lighten the burden somewhat.
you might want to look at: https://emacs.amodernist.com/ which provides a rudimentary configuration generator.
Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].
Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module... just a few days ago which could be a useful resource when you're building yours up.
> Unsolicited tip: Take it as a hobby! Picked up a bunch of useful learnings from my Emacs experiences (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my devtools work which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through life and build dope stuff, unencumbered!
P.S.: I found Emacs far less painful ever since I started rubber-ducking with ChatGPT about my elisp and configuration problems a few years ago, so now is definitely a nicer time to take the plunge.
1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.
2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.
"This is a minimal Emacs starter kit. Like, really minimal. Here's the short of the philosophy:
Focus on using default, built-in Emacs behavior
Yes, we all love our fancy third-party packages. This starter kit focuses on what is built-in to Emacs. Why? Because there are too many good packages and picking and choosing the best is a joy we leave to the user.
Explain every customization and encourage modification
The goal of this starter kit is to encourage end-user adaptation and growth. All of the .el files should be legible and, more importantly, justify in plain English the rationale for adding the configuration they do.
No magic
We keep things crushingly simple here. That means no fancy loadable modules or whatnot. Everything is as straight-forward as can be."
You really don't need to build up a config from scratch to get the full power of emacs. Using doom just gets you further along the curve to having the config that you want. You will definitely need to do some further tinkering with elisp to get doom configured "just so" or to implement functionality, and I find that's plenty enough for learning emacs.