Thanks for the suggestion, but for now I can only bookmark it for later. My priority right now is to reach basic competency ASAP, so I'm running Spacemacs. I love the "batteries included" thing, but just installing it took like an hour of fiddling before I just gave up and ingored the error message. I don't think it'd be wise to fiddle around with the settings if even the defaults are going haywire.

Ah sure, it's good to stick with the default packages in your distribution then... I started from scracth and found that Ivy was more than sufficient for everything I need (and it's quite a lot lighter than Helm).

BTW what was the error mesage?

Good luck!