Emacs setups

Since everyone in http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1252775746 answered "Emacs," and everyone here uses Lisp, I'm curious what your setups are. What modes make it easier to balance parens without contracting a homicidal case of carpal tunnel? What color-themes don't suck? How do I run Emacs on the bare metal?

What modes make it easier to balance parens without contracting a homicidal case of carpal tunnel?
Compared to what? FIOC tabbing? Curly braces and semicolons? Or, *gasp*, closing XML tags? Actually I could see FIOC working well with a lisp. A parser should be able to directly insert close parens as needed, but macrology might be a bit of a clusterfuck.