Hopefully you’ve read the docs and know that you can override settings and implement your own extensions rather easily:

Create a Lisp file under ~/.emacs.d/ specific to your username ($USER-NAME.el) or system ($SYSTEM-NAME.el) that Emacs with emacs-starter-kit will load automatically at startup.

I’ve created mine specific to my user name – ~/.emacs.d/kmarti05.el. You can determine the value of your user-name in emacs by issuing C-h-v user-login-name.

Here is the contents of my ~/.emacs.d/kmarti05.el file:

;; visible bell
(setq visible-bell nil)
;; allow selection deletion
(delete-selection-mode t)
;; make sure delete key is delete key
(global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char)
;; turn on the menu bar
(menu-bar-mode 1)
;; have emacs scroll line-by-line
(setq scroll-step 1)
;; set color-theme
(color-theme-zenburn)
(defun my-zoom (n)
"Increase or decrease font size based upon argument"
(set-face-attribute 'default (selected-frame) :height
(+ (face-attribute 'default :height) (* (if (> n 0) 1 -1) 10))))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-+")      '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom 1)))
(global-set-key [C-kp-add]       '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom 1)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-_")      '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom -1)))
(global-set-key [C-kp-subtract]  '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom -1)))
(message "All done!")