People say you should leave Emacs's default keybindings unchanged.

Emacs is unbelievably customizable. Nearly any key can be changed. But there's advice given to rely on the defaults; they have been honed over years and years to be the best for everyone.

Forget that.

Emacs is better when it's tailored to you specifically.

I have never used C-z -- at least, not on purpose.

C-z minimizes the Emacs frame. I would hit it by accident, surprising me when Emacs disappeared. For nearly a decade, I left it bound, hoping I would eventually get used to it. After all, the default keybindings had been carefully planned out. Right?

Right. But they have not been planned out for you.

Your needs are not the average user's needs, and your solutions should be different too.

So change your Emacs to work with you.

You can rearrange keybindings to make more sense to you. Or override existing keybindings with improved functions. M-c on my Emacs goes to #'capitalize-dwim, because that's better than #'capitalize-word. I've replaced C-M-f, C-M-k, and other s-expression navigation functions with smartparens.

Some other ways you might want to configure Emacs:

• Disable the toolbar and menubar. Take the screen space back.

• Hide the startup screen. Make your Emacs boot right to *scratch*.

• Don't use the custom file. Configure everything with Emacs Lisp.

If you believe that everything in Emacs was designed to be unchangeable, you're missing out on the best parts of Emacs.

After all, it was designed to let you change it.