[adlpz]

A question for the heavy Emacs users:

What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?

I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there.

However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe borders of the preconfigured, leader-key-accessible realm, I'm quite lost. I don't have good intuitions on how to interact with more raw parts of the system.

And I do want to venture further, so I'm feeling I need to get re-started with one of the recommended tutorials/books.

Should I start fresh Emacs install instead?

PS: I've coded in a bunch of lisps in the past and I have already done a bit of customization on top of Doom, so I sort of know my way around, but I'm just not comfortable I guess.

[tmtvl]

My petty opinion is that distributions which disable the menu bar are bad, distributions which use an edgelord dark theme are bad, and distributions which do both are terrible. Where Doom in particular is concerned I dislike the fact that it starts with Vi keybindings by default (I quite disfavour modal editing, there's a reason I switched away from Vim after 5 years) and that it changes the 's' binding so I can't even rely on my muscle memory.

I've tried both Spacemacs and Doom (and others like Witchmacs and Bedrock) and now I'm just using my own 800 line init.el (which does include comments and whitespace so the actual LOC will be lower) and 110 line custom.el (if you set the custom file to a different file than your init then using customize to change settings won't mess things up if you manually edit your init).

If you really like Doom you can try reading its code base, if it's just too much then maybe it would be better to try setting up your own configuration from scratch.

[jbstack]

I think some of these are unfair criticisms, because they are things that can be trivially changed. E.g. disabling evil mode or changing the theme are one-line modifications in the Doom config. After all, any opinionated Emacs distro has to make some choices otherwise there would be little point in anyone using one.

For me the issues with Doom are (a) the complexity as a whole that it introduces, and (b) so many things are already installed/configured that you end up using them without any real "under the hood" understanding which is so essential for customisation.

[tom_]

One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and once you're up and running you won't need it (but you can ctrl+right click on the buffer to get if you ever feel like you do...) - and, meanwhile, it's taking up space on the screen that you could use for more lines of text.

(macOS users are stuck with the menu bar generally, and that means they're stuck with the Emacs menu bar too. Just ignore it.)

While you're there, get rid of the scroll bars too. They never work properly, and this way you get an extra column or two of text per window.

[tmtvl]

The Edit menu has undo, cut, copy, and paste. Is that stuff that only makes sense if you're into Emacs already? The Help menu has the tutorial and the manual. Same question. The File menu has open file, save, save as, close, and quit. If you open a file which uses a mode which has options you get a menu showing those options.

I don't think the discoverability of all those things is worth giving up in exchange for 1 more line of text, but of course everyone is different and that makes the world such an interesting place.

[tom_]

Hmm, good question. I had another go, for the first time in years, albeit with experienced Emacs eyes now, so I know roughly what's going on. Still felt like every click just gave me More Emacs Shit, which I remember being the main confusing thing.

Almost none of the options bring up a friendly GUI dialog of the sort you might be accustomed to; you're most likely just plonked back in the Emacs frame, possibly in some new window that opened in some random place, that doesn't seem to work quite like anything you've ever seen before, or possibly in the minibuffer, ditto, plus its own set of additional confusing aspects.

So perhaps the suggestion to just dispense with it entirely (along with the toolbar, which I forgot to mention...) was just the thing that got me over this initial notch in the difficulty curve, the bit where I just needed to give up and accept that Emacs was going to be one of those things that was absolutely not like anything else.

(You're not wrong about the discoverability though. I've been using Emacs for 20 years now and I did find a couple of interesting-looking things.)

[craftkiller]

> What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?

If you use vanilla emacs without customization, you are going to have a very basic text editor experience. That is fine if you understand that, and understand that you'll need to start adding your own customizations (like enabling eglot for LSP, and company-mode for code completions, etc) in order to get to an experience closer to what you'd get out of the box in an IDE like vscode.

Some people might see vanilla emacs, assume emacs is just a plain text editor, and go back to their fancy IDEs. For them, distros like doom/space would be good for avoiding that initial shock/disappointment.

Another great use for doom/space is to see what is possible. Figure out what bits you like, and then figure out how to enable them in your own vanilla-based config. Essentially window-shopping for your own emacs config.

But in the end, I'd recommend you eventually get to the state I am in: I started with a completely vanilla emacs and then slowly added the bits that I wanted. That way I have only what I want, and nothing that I don't want. I don't get surprised by unexpected features. My breakages are fewer because I use so few packages. My load times are great because I am not loading a bunch of stuff I don't use. I understand everything that is enabled in my config.

You also might want to check out emacs-solo. It's a config that is built based entirely on built-in packages rather than 3rd party packages. I still use some 3rd-party packages like company-mode but it is good to see just how far you can go with the built-in stuff (for example, you probably don't need projectile, you can use the built-in project.el, and you probably don't need lsp-mode, you can use the built-in eglot): https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo

[Karrot_Kream]

Whatever works for you works. If you want to use your editor for a goal, using the guardrails of Doom is fine. I use a vanilla setup as my base but I've been using emacs since before distributions. If you want to tinker or otherwise learn emacs more deeply, feel free to start from a vanilla config.

[Ferret7446]

Don't use them. A personal config is highly personal, and a distro force someone else's preferences onto you. Even things like how exactly your config is organized.

But ultimately it's all about tradeoffs and what works for you. You don't necessarily need to go beyond your distro, but if you want to or need to, then that's a good sign to try it

[jwrallie]

I went from Emacs to Vim to Vscode and back to Emacs with Doom, but I still use pretty much all of them. Vscode has copilot, Emacs has org mode, vim is great for light editing.

Vim is the magic that lets me use all of those for what I want without having to change muscle memory, and Doom just happens to aligns with my needs perfectly on that regard.

I think anyone trying to master Emacs within the lines of this article will be trying to bend it to their particular needs and likely will be annoyed at any opinionated configuration.

The answer to your question will depend if you want to add community extensions beyond what Doom integrates or if you want to personalize Emacs by yourself. The latter will work just fine with leader keys as long as you map them, all Elisp should be still available in pretty much the same way. The former will probably be much harder.

[joshuablais]

I personally use Doom because there are a lot of out of the box optimizations, some don't like how hlissner has brought nix ideas of declarative package management into the mix, but I am a nix user so it makes sense. I also am an evil (heretic) user - Doom is configured from the get go as a gateway from vim/neovim into emacs, and it does that job very well.

I would say use both. You can run multiple emacs configurations, and you could have your vanilla config which you slowly build as well as Doom/spacemacs where you can see what is possible.

[jbstack]

They have their place. I started out with Doom and it definitely helped to streamline the beginner phase where vanilla would have felt overwhelming. But, as with you, I soon became frustrated when I wanted to move beyond its default configuration.

I've since switched to Vanilla and I've been using ChatGPT to gradually explain and help me integrate the Doom features that I like, so that I end up with a similar base that I actually understand and which I can deviate from where I want to.

[zelphirkalt]

I have tried Doom Emacs in a Debian VM on Windows host, because that was the opportunity to install a new Emacs thing for me (to code while playing a game). There Doom Emacs was not stable. Sometimes it just crashed and one time I even lost a whole function I wrote, because somehow it doesn't do the same backup file thing Emacs usually does. The keybindings were nice, but the stability requirement I have overrules it. So I am back to standard Emacs and currently using evil mode.

[gtpedrosa]

I'm in the same boat and curious if other more experienced users have any resources to point to. My anedoctal data point is that after starting with doom emacs and having problems to set it up on another machine i fund out all i needed was a very small configuration file to accomplish my orgmode/agenda usage needs. So all it took was an issue and a clear vision of the goal to find a way through. Maybe it is a healthy approach to keep the complexity manageable to your usage

[stebalien]

IMO, they're a great way to get started without having to invest too much time up-front. On the other hand, that was 10 years ago and it's a LOT easier to throw together a usable config nowadays; with LSP + built-in tree-sitter modes, you no longer need 3 packages per language plus a bunch of configuration glue.

[kamaal]

>>I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now

Trust me, move to Google Docs.

This is simply a whole larger and easier universe compared to anything Org-mode will ever evolve to be. Its also backed up online, pictures are embedded in the document itself. And several other features come out of the box. You also don't have spend years learning to use it, and can get productive from minute 1.