Being an Emacs newbie, I wanted my configuration mimic my Vim setup. I was lucky to run into @JEG2's Emacs config - out of all other configurations I found, it happened to be split up in the most logical manner. My setup is heavily inspired by his, along with bits and pieces from other people's.

Walkthrough

The initialization process is outlined in the init.el. First, it defines a function for evaluating each elisp files inside the init directory. A brief explanation for each init file follows:

1. freshen - replaces old .elc files if newer, corresponding .el ones exist in the directory
2. system - load system-specific settings
3. autoloads - regenerate the autoload definitions file if any of the files in functions is newer
4. packages - handles installing or removing any packages
5. compile - compiles any .el files in the hostsamurai directory
6. autohooks - autoloads everything in the hooks, each filename representing the corresponding mode it applies to
7. settings - loads everything in the settings directory, where any cosmetic or functional settings that don't fit in the aforementioned directories live

Installation

Clone the repo and symlink to it to your home directory with ln -sr emacs.d ~/.emacs.d/. It's probably a good idea to move your existing .emacs.d elsewhere prior to doing this ;)