Emacs GUI Decorations

The typical ‘File, Edit, Options…’ menu at the top. Very useful for discovering functions in new modes, or for accessing unusual stuff you don’t have a key-binding for.

Buttons for very common tasks. The standard tool-bar has buttons for the most basic editing tasks, which can almost always be more easily accessed with the associated keybindings. If you have tooltip-mode on, hovering over the buttons displays these keybindings (if available), so it is common practice to turn the tool bar off once you are fairly comfortable in Emacs.

However, there are a few context-sensitive tool bars, including for *Help* and *info* buffers, which can make navigating much easier.

There is also the debugger tool-bar for gud, which I consider absolutely essential if you ever use a gud-based debugger (notably the gdb interface).

Scroll bars. This one seems to be popular to disable alongside the previous two, but I don’t see why. You lose maybe two columns of characters at the right side of the screen, which your code should be staying away from anyway, and gain a useful visualisation of where you are in the document, as well as a way to quickly navigate in a way most computer users will understand.

A newer one, which adds a right-click menu that includes just about what you’d expect, including contextual actions for certain modes. I have this enabled, but removed its binding of the <menu> key, since its default binding of execute-extended-command (same as M-x) is much more useful in my opinion:

(assoc-delete-all 'menu context-menu-mode-map)
(context-menu-mode 1)