There are several so-called “starter kits” which provide default Emacs configurations that reflect the preferences of their creators. They are all quite different from the default GnuEmacs default configuration.
Ranked in terms of popularity, as measured by the number of stars on their GitHub repos (all numbers as of 2016-01-16):
| Name | Stars | Contributors | Commits | Size (kb, zipped) | Site | |
| Spacemacs | 5476 | 318 | 5276 | 6040 | https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs | |
| Prelude | 2723 | 100 | 1188 | 80 | https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude | |
| purcell emacs.d | 2417 | 13 | 2427 | 60 | https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d | |
| magnars emacs.d | 910 | 6 | 1359 | 500 | https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d | |
| Emacs-24 Starter Kit | 630 | 19 | 568 | 190 | https://github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit | |
| oh-my-emacs | 540 | 10 | 325 | 110 | https://github.com/xiaohanyu/oh-my-emacs | |
| Better Defaults | 379 | 2 | 11 | 4 | https://github.com/technomancy/better-defaults | |
| Graphene | 189 | 2 | 335 | 40 | https://github.com/rdallasgray/graphene | |
| ohai-emacs | 180 | 4 | 124 | 170 | https://github.com/bodil/ohai-emacs | |
| ergoemacs-mode | 115 | 13 | 2570 | 1800 | https://github.com/ergoemacs/ergoemacs-mode |