Peter Vasil just revolutionised my life (again) when he took me through the Emacs starter kit and showed me his copy of the PeepCode Meet Emacs screencast. So much works out of the box, I don’t now remember what the ‘kit’ fixed. Peter also shared his {username}.el file in the .emacs.d folder so that things start up in a great way.
There’s a problem with YAsnippet though, seems to work (I think) but an error flashes past the minibuffer every time Emacs starts. Need to solve this one day…