Doom Emacs — Best of both worlds?

(updated )

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For a couple months last year, I became borderline obsessed with Emacs. While initially a massive learning curve to begin grasping I found it extremely powerful and intriguing. The first few days were quite challenging but I was slowly finding my way through and thoroughly enjoying myself. Realizing the power that was in my hands with Emacs Lisp, I couldn’t help but dive headfirst into configuring and tweaking into the perfect development and editor for myself.

With no prior experience with Lisp, not even realizing it was still in use in the current day and age, I was very surprised at what something so simple (in theory) could accomplish. It was not without headache and frustration though. It seemed like every documentation, or introduction to Emacs Lisp was way over my head and would require nothing short of a Computer Science degree to make sense of. All this talk of cons, car, and cdr was enough to make my head spin. Somehow, I trudged through and began tweaking my configuration. Simple things. Nicer font. New colors. Rainbow Mode. The list goes on.

It was never enough

Thoughts of unlimited power coursed through my veins as I dove deeper into the possibilities. I spent days (probably even weeks) tweaking and refining an org-mode configuration based on the Getting Things Done system. It even inspired me enough to buy the book, which I sadly haven’t finished reading. I was hooked, entranced by the power presented to me, with no practical knowledge of how to apply it. That wouldn’t stop me though. Not yet.

The deeper I dove, the more I began to see problems in my init.el & friends. Simple solution? Try out some of the more minimal Emacs distributions and configurations available online. Many of them were great, and I was particularly fond of the Purcell and Prelude setups. Even using each of them for some time on my own, expanding as necessary. Yet still finding reasons for wanting more a totally custom setup. Eventually basing my last configuration off of Emacs Bootstrap and setting off with a mostly blank slate and sensible defaults.

Jumping in the deep end, with no idea how to swim

Each passing day, I spent hours reading, adjusting and adding packages. At the time I wasn’t even working on any projects except for this Emacs config. Yet I was setting things up for languages I hadn’t touched in years. Things mostly worked, but frequently they didn’t. Strange errors popped up that left me spending hours working to fix them. In some cases even entirely scrapping whichever idea I had that I could not realize into code. My config quickly became a horrible mess that I could hardly make sense of, let alone anyone else.

In the beginning of October 2019 I migrated back home to Gentoo, taking my Emacs configuration with me. Mind you, before the migration, I was having some strange errors which would totally lock up Emacs to the point it required a little kill -s SIGKILL love to take down. As much as I attempted to track down the issue, I could not figure it out. My config was too far gone, and too far broken. Between that, and a couple issues other issues that seemed more specific to how I built Emacs, it became unbearable. I just could not get any work done. It might crash in five minutes, or it might take five hours. It got to me. Bad. Eventually, I had enough and rage-purged Emacs from my system and made it a point to learn Vim. After all, it is included out of the box on nearly every Linux distribution I had ever worked with. May as well, right?

Simplicity, but not much else

Once I began to get over the initial hurdle of finding my way around Vim, it felt great. I was very impressed by what it could do, how quickly it worked, and how lightweight it felt compared to my utterly destroyed Emacs config.

I actually found myself very happy with Vim and hardly felt the need to install any plugins, or make heavy tweaks. Just my Zenburn theme to match my system, and some edits to the .vimrc file kept me quite content for a while.

Several months of enjoyment and Python development work blew by me before I began to feel limited again. I was missing my org-mode, ease of extending, and just plain missing the power Emacs presented to me.

Vim is Doomed

While I was not entirely feeling extremely limited by Vim, it wasn’t the end all be all that I originally felt it was. The built-in terminal support felt lacking, and awkward to use so I made very heavy use of C-z to back and forth as I worked on projects. It was almost distracting in a way, and nearly always resulted in many forgotten instances of Vim floating around various terminals. The lack of a decent GUI version was a bit limiting in it’s own way. Not that I want flashy UI elements, or toolbars and such. I just find a certain appeal to being able to launch my editor of choice in a dedicated window and keep it open at all times. GVim was not my idea of that. I was feeling limited, and watching much of the Mythical Crew get themselves onto Emacs made me realize more what I was missing out on.

Yet I didn’t want to go totally back to Emacs. I would have to re-learn the keybinds and toss away much of what I learned during the few months in Vim. To me, that left one main option. Evil mode. It would allow me to use a horrific combination of keybinds and functionality from both worlds.

I needed something that would come mostly pre-configured out of the box. With sensible defaults, support for the languages and features I use, and the ability to expand that setup as I find areas in need of adjustment to suit my flow.

Spacemacs was the first distribution that came to mind. But I really did not like that when I tried it out some time ago. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but something just felt off. It felt a bit heavier than what I wanted, and did not seem to be as easily expandable without a deeper knowledge of Lisp. Thus I took a pass on trying it again.

Tossing around thoughts of a few of the previously mentioned distributions from my original experience with Emacs had me feeling I was about to repeat the process that got me into this mess in the first place. Something entirely new to me was needed. Something like Doom Emacs.

“It is a story as old as time. A stubborn, shell-dwelling, and melodramatic vimmer—envious of the features of modern text editors—spirals into despair before he succumbs to the dark side. This is his config.”

That alone was enough to tell me — Doom is your best shot at success. I had to give it a shot. Admittedly, I was a bit thrown off by the inclusion of a separate script for managing the Doom installation but I went ahead with it anyway. As it turned out, everything went without a hitch and I find myself actually grateful for that script. It made the installation, and future management of my setup much easier and pain-free than I imagined it would be. Nowhere near as much micromanagement of packages, user-config, or updates. I was loving it from the first moment I fired it up.

Welcome back home, I’ve missed you, Emacs

Of course, the first few hours were spent struggling to discover my old functionality or keybinds to properly use Doom. Slightly complicated in that reading the official Emacs documentation wouldn’t help me with the keys. I did catch my footing, and rediscovered the beautiful way Emacs is self-documenting and incredibly helpful. It did not take me long to begin, to some extent, proficient enough to begin using Emacs over Vim.

Granted, it hasn’t even been a week yet, and I’m nowhere near as proficient as I was originally. With Evil mode, much of that re-learning was mitigated and I feel comfortable handling basic edits and workspace management. Not to mention how much more responsive and fluid working in Emacs feels.

Granted, we can’t let ourselves fall back into the same trap that got me before. I have let myself settle into knowing the Doom setup is working very well for my needs, and I do not actually need to write a configuration of tens of files spanning hundreds (thousands?) of lines which hardly work together. It just works. Make changes as they are needed, not because I might want a specific feature some day in the distant future, if ever.

Off into the sunset

Here we are now, comfortably writing this post in Doom Emacs, enjoying every bit of it. Especially the fill-paragraph command. Words don’t even describe the frustration I had at times, manually re-flowing a paragraph in Vim because I changed a single word somewhere. I’ve even been taking the opportunity to give Lisp a second shot. I haven’t actually created anything truly useful with it yet, but I feel I am beginning to understand it. Much of that is thanks to Steve Yegge’s Emergency Elisp post, which goes over the basics of Elisp syntax in a way that actually makes sense to me.

While I don’t plan (for now at least) on writing the next Magit or major extension to Doom Emacs, I do have some ideas. Simple things that will make my life easier when I work. Almost certainly these ideas will grow into something larger over time. For now, I’m making it a point to just enjoy Emacs and take it slow. No sense jumping right in to the deep end straight from the start.

Here’s to you, Emacs, and many more buffers to come in the days (years?) to come. Thank you for taking me back, with a gentle and caring hand, right when I needed you the most.