I’m sorry to inform you that it is perfectly possible. When I encounter a system which has a completely stock and unconfigured Emacs, I generally only modify one or two settings, and then I’m perfectly happy to use it in that state. I’ve used Emacs for 30 years, and I still use it heavily every day.

One of the sharpest people I know—he's a professor and hacks on the LLVM for a living—uses stock Emacs in the terminal with no discernible customization.

Linus Torvalds lives in pretty much vanilla microemacs.

People have been doing this since the 70s :)

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