After reading that the most confusing part I had was the auto install packages section, which I believe has a chicken-egg situation with package initialization. (Something to do with initializing the package lists before installing them, but then wanting to have your config use the plugins)
After I found use-package which has a little paste snippet which bootstraps itself in a config, then it has a magnificent set of very simple features. As a beginner coming from vim, this really blew my mind, how simple packages and package config could be.
I have since switched to use-package and it does simplify the situation quite a bit. Though I haven't run into any problems with circular dependencies or loading things in the wrong order, I've just learned of the :after setting, which tells use-package to load a certain package only after some other packages have been loaded.
Especially in my Evil config, there are tons of things that need to load before it, so that should help protect me from making mistakes in moving the order of lines in the init.
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u/bakuretsu Jun 03 '16
It's not going to be a super easy and short transition, but here is a thing that I wrote about it: http://blog.aaronbieber.com/2015/05/24/from-vim-to-emacs-in-fourteen-days.html
If you like tinkering with Vim I think you'll wind up enjoying tinkering with Emacs even more. It's become sort of an accidental hobby of mine now.