I started with Spacemacs, and became captivated with the idea of Emacs, but then I became overwhelmed by all the layers upon layers of complexity that were in Spacemacs. I’m the kind of guy who, when I have a problem to solve. I Google it. I don’t like reading documentation full of other jargon that I have to look up yet again endlessly. So when I Googled my questions, I found people asking in plain English the kinds of problems I had, and people answering with the correct terminology that I hadn’t heard before, but I was still lost in applying that new info for a Spacemacs config. Heck, I often found people asking for help here on this subreddit for their Spacemacs config, and mostly when I found was people pointing them back to their own Spacemacs community for support since Spacemacs is almost an entirely different beast than Emacs as far as troubleshooting goes.

Then, I heard about Doom Emacs. It started up faster and was easier to start being productive in it sooner. It didn’t have the feature set of Spacemacs, but that was fine. I just wanted a stable base to work off of that didn’t have the insane defaults that vanilla Emacs has. The learning curve for Doom Emacs was much shorter than Spacemacs. The syntax for configuring various parts of an Emacs config is basically the same as vanilla Emacs but with adding an “!” at the end of a bunch of things, which allowed for mostly optional extras. And once I got used to the fact that, when I wanted to install a package, I’d first check to see if it is mentioned as a commented-out line in my init.el file. If not there, then add it to my packages.el file with no configuration there, contrary to how most package installation instructions seem to show that you can configure the package in the same place where you install it. All package configuration happens in the config.el file. Doom Emacs does handn’t keybind configuration a bit differently than vanilla Emacs, but once you set up a few of those in your config.el file, then it’s easy to continue following your own example from then on.

Other than that, I’ve found that by using Doom Emacs, I can better make sense of vanilla Emacs questions and answers I find online. But with Spacemacs, I always felt like I was isolated and on my own unless I wanted to post a question to the Spacemacs community specifically and wait.