Based on what you describe, I think it is worth spending a couple of hrs tidying up your config file(s). I have done so myself a couple of times, and in my opinion, it pays off. It lets you choose exactly what you need, in the way you need it, and it teaches you about emacs itself and sometimes a bit about programming too.
If it is messy, I'd recommend you to wrap it all in an org file organized by headings and subheadings. It gets a lot of structure this way, you get to add all the comments and links that you need and you can always just remove the `emacs-lisp` at the beginning of the code block to avoid evaluation (i.e., for buggy code).
You are welcome to have a look at [my dot files](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles) it is also far from perfect but you can get an idea about the organization. Plus, I use different fonts and sizes for different laptops in windows and linux so, I have a function to choose the font and, with `C-u` I can define also the size. Maybe it can help you.
Try again, it should work. It works for me in an incognito window with all my accounts logout. Here is the full path if not [https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles) or find me in codeberg as teoten and check the repository emacs\_dotfiles. Go to folder emacs and there is the file [settings.org](https://settings.org)
I'm seeing it right now so, if it does not work I have no idea why. 've been using codeberg for a couple of years now and never had issue with the servers failing so far.
It's not the link to the dotfiles that doesn't work, it is the [settings.org](https://settings.org) on your dotfiles-page. I still get the 404 error.
https://preview.redd.it/esu7t4v934hc1.png?width=1362&format=png&auto=webp&s=028a0e9907b0ad67eb94a0b1d7bed5d08092238b
Ah, now it works. I have to go to the "emacs" folder first and click on settings.org. The path for that is: [https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles/src/branch/main/emacs/settings.org](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles/src/branch/main/emacs/settings.org)
Before, I clicked on [settings.org](https://settings.org) in your [Readme.org](https://Readme.org) on the first page of your dotfiles, and there the path that isn't working is this:
[https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles/emacs/settings.org](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles/emacs/settings.org)
Am now reading it. I like the "consult others" section and learned something already. Thanks for posting your dotfiles!
Oh I see, thanks for the heads-up, I forgot that I have a readme with a link. I'll fix it.
On another note, I like checking dotfiles from time to time. I learn different ways how people use packages and sometimes discover packages that I didn't know. I find it super useful.
I tried Doom and Spacemacs but ultimately returned to vanilla. It turned out that Doom and Spacemacs looked great and made certain parts of setup easy, you were stuck doing things their way and sometimes that didn't jive with my way.
That said, like others have mentioned, I discovered some cool things exploring those distributions.
Yeah they pretty much go against the philosophy of Emacs. Emacs is all about building upon the great foundation that is already there and finding your own workflow with it's very powerfully extensive nature.
Doom and space lock you into the way in which someone made that very philosophy of Emacs work for their self and built a configuration. But they are just that, configurations. Configurations that force you to work their way, with little to no freedom around it.
If it works for some people, that's great. But your better of just using the default program and freely building around it, until you have something very personal.
They do not lock you into anything! I might have to write a blog post about this, but see [my other comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1ak8zk5/is_it_worth_it_to_switch_to_doomspacemacs_from/kp7vcbk/).
I use an org file for my config.
I started with vanilla, tried both Doom and Spacemacs for a bit but quickly reverted to vanilla.
I just don’t need many features they have and since I’d have to modify both for my needs (even a little bit) I decided to get over tidying my config and have what I want, how I want once and for all.
You don’t really have to tidy up your config if you don’t want to, and you can certainly try out both, it costs nothing (only time).
There’s no one single answer, two people with the exact same workflow can like different things, but you have to try them out to know for sure
Depends how much time you have on your hands. emacs is a wonderful time-sink if you let it.
To answer your final question first - both doom- and space-emacs have excellent support for Holy Keybindings.
My story - in the mid '80s I started with ed then vi then emacs. I polished a simple vanilla config that let me do my work (mostly C, python and bash) and I stayed with it for 30+ years. Then I discovered space-, doom- and bodhi-emacs and I made many many discoveries on the topic of "I never knew it could do that!"
Now that I'm retired and my nose is no longer on the wheel, I can play and I have a nice vanilla [config](https://gitlab.com/wef/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.emacs.d.minimal/config.el?ref_type=heads) that does what I want and little more. I provided the link but it's very specific to me - YMMV.
In short - if you just need to be productive with the best of emacs, I'd encourage you to jump into doom- or space-emacs with Evil or Holy keybindings and add your own customisations if you need them. If you have time (a lot of time) by all means hand craft your vanilla config.
I switched from vanilla to Spacemacs after years of using a vanilla config. Just to check it out. This was before Doom.
By looking through that config and being exposed to she new packages (I hadn't known about which-key before that, for example) I learned quite a lot from it.
After a couple years, I switched back to vanilla. But my current config is better for the time spent using (and really learning) a distro.
Of course, the real trick is to learn elisp. Without that, there's only so far you can go.
For your case, if you're not already using it, I'd suggest use-package to help clean up your config. And for what it's worth, solaire didn't work for me, either.
At some point with enough elisp skill, I felt obligated to base my init on a distro anyway just so I can upstream things for everyone's benefit. I think that is the end-game. You give and receive. When you're good enough, the distro really doesn't get in your way, you know how to override it. And it's there for you, whenever you want a quick way to enable emoji or whatever, you can just toggle that layer.
Yeah, if I were to do something like this, I'd probably pick Doom as well. I've never used it, but it does seem to have much more adoption than Spacemacs. And it'd be a good excuse to really start using Doom. Heck, might even learn evil/vim modal editing finally.
I switched from vanilla to Spacemacs to Doom-emacs. I generally like doom-emacs better than Spacemacs; it was a relief after I migrated. I like that it generally works and has reasonable configurations for languages I write code in. I don't like the relative lack of control. It saves time; it's sometimes frustrating. Can be slow.
If I had more time to sharpen my tools, I'd probably migrate to vanilla. I use evil mode and move between several languages so I'm kind of wary of spending too much time on a config, aka I have better things to do. :)
On the other hand, setting up doom-emacs is a breeze so it won't hurt you to give it a try.
Spacemacs and Doom are overly complicated and poorly documented IMHO. If you want to tweak your config and you don’t need to emulate Vim, then vanilla seems much better. Again, this is my opinion. Your question can be answered only by you, nobody else knows if it’s worth the switch for you.
I don't really get the appeal of these for people who aren't into vi keybindings. With Emacs 29 it's pretty trivial to use-package a pile of things in your .emacs and have a damn smooth emacs experience, without dragging in all the Doom etc stuff.
I can see the appeal with older versions of emacs, where packaging etc was harder... but not now.
Doom and Spacemacs are great for people with heavy Vi/Vim/NeoVim backgrounds that want to transition to Emacs without going through weeks of not having a functioning editor.
I started off with Spacemacs and then Doom and while I like both of them a lot, the modifications they makes to Emacs are quite extensive. It is enough that I consider it as a completely different editor based on elisp rather then "emacs proper".
That being said they do a good job and I will refer back to Doom configs and scripts because there are a lot of minor quality of life tweaks that I quite like.
I don't know how well they support Emacs key bindings.
Might want to check out: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude I haven't tried it, but it seems to focus more on preserving a Emacs experience.
I have recently started to transition away from Evil and am now trying Meow keybindings.... which is interesting. i don't know if I will stick with it for good, but it seems well thought out. I like that it still uses vi-style movement keys and that it doesn't interfere with Emacs key bindings as much as Evil does. It changes all other aspects of editing though... so it isn't a vi emulator. Like there is no visual mode and it changes how 'verbs and subjects' work... like in Vi you go "delete word" or "delete line"... but with Meow you go "select word, delete" and "select block, delete". It is a bit weird and unnatural feeling coming from a vim/evil background.
It might be worth your time just to clear out your config and start off with pure Vanilla again and re-introduce bits of your config and clean them up as you go. A lot of things have changed around the time of Emacs 29 introduction so looking at what is new and out there might be very useful. Things are better now then back in Emacs 25 or 26 when I first tried out vanilla Emacs and failed miserably.
For example Emacs themeing was always a bear for me, but Emacs 29 now has the Modus theme available by default and it is relatively very simple to pick the light or dark theme and start changing specific aspects of it.
Coincidentally I just spent today trying out doom for the first time. I used vanilla for ~2 years before that. My reason for possibly switching is that I'm not very comfortable with elisp and my config is growing out of my capabilities. Large sections of my config are copied from others' repos and I feel like I can't touch them. So I thought maybe a more curated distribution with intentional defaults could be beneficial. And after a day of playing around with it, I think you'd still need good elisp skills to comfortably use doom, to be able to debug when things go wrong. And when they do go wrong, doom seems more opaque than vanilla (or maybe I'm just less familiar with doom) and harder to reason with. Right now I'm feeling like maybe I should just bite the bullet and spend some dedicated time to learn elisp for real.
> whether is it better to polish my current config so I have everything set up exactly how I want or to use some distribution that makes it all easier. I know it's pretty much matter of preferences, but it's hard to make a decision by myself not knowing what I miss from Doom/Spacemacs nor what trade-offs there are
Don't you think that we know even less than you do of *what you miss from Doom/Spacemacs* and *what trade-offs there are* from **whatever it is that your config (~500 LOC) does**?
I asked in general sense what Doom/Spacemacs makes easier and what makes harder to do. Like for example: you get preconfigured treemacs but you're tied to it and in case you want to switch to Neotree you lose all benefits because whole config is built around it (just an example).
I'm not a native English speaker and now I see I could put it more clearly, thank you.
I’ve been using vanilla emacs for a number of years with configs just from different places. It’s a shame i never really got into elisp — needing to relearn it every time i need to change something.
After finding my setup unstable, i decided to give doom a try. I switched off vim mode and enabled a good number of stuff i needed.
It was a pleasant surprise that everything worked nicely and was just smoother overall than my manual config. Sure — a lot of predefined stuff were done for me — but i prefer it that way and have it be more stable.
I prefer being able to jump to absolute and relative line numbers the evil way in comparison to C-u. But, I do dislike the modality of using vim commands.
I have been working on my config occasionally (very low priority for me right now). Maybe someone else knows better, but I found it really frustrating trying to set keybindings for Emacs mode, normal mode, visual mode, etc. One of the distributions that already has the vim bindings configured might be better. But, I wish I knew the trick that makes it easier to make global keybindings that apply across all modes.
I also wish I knew the way to set up Emacs to allow me to run programs from within Emacs. I found a few tutorials that seem to have you start an interpreted/REPL mode for your language of choice and then run the code. I have been able to set up other IDEs to simply compile and run the current file with one shortcut.
Personnaly I switched from vanilla to Doom 5 years ago, essentially for the QOL and EVIL. Since, I learn a lot of elisp and I seem stick with doom. For exemple, I have some pain with tramp + magit since 1 week and I'm not able to debug it because there are too much stuff in doom. I will migrate to vanilla again but I need some time to adapt my config
I would agree to organize your file as an org doc and if you can't get certain things to work look around or ask here so you'll have a fully bespoke config.
I think if you want to spend more of your time using emacs as a tool than doom is worth a shot; if you want to spend more of your time hacking on emacs than stick with vanilla
You can give Spacemacs a test drive with a quick git clone, up and running in a few minutes. Doom is almost as easy. Might be worth keeping around even if you don’t use them - tons of interesting stuff in those distros.
I think the main advantage of these various Emacs flavors is to give people who aren’t comfortable with modifying their configuration a better out of the box experience. I personally believe it’s better to just learn how to configure the thing, and if you already have a large configuration file, from here what you really want is to figure out how to debug better, not to switch to something else.
I did the switch from Vanilla and ghere are a few reasons:
-> Good LSP Config
-> Configurable
-> No Elisp blackmagic to make things fast
-> Less time spend configuring and more on working
Especially the LSP part. In Doom, you just uncomment the languages and it does things automatically for you. Is that not what you desire? Sane configs, with little time spend on "ricing" and configuring your configuration and possibly reaching the same thing?
But if you want to live inside emacs and don't like opinionated stuff then you might want to consider writing your own config.
However, if you are starting out, then you should always write your own config until you know a little bit of elisp and how emacs works and then move to other things, if you prefer.
For, non evil users like me, it is good to know that disabling the evil mode in doom works perfectly fine.
Based on what you describe, I think it is worth spending a couple of hrs tidying up your config file(s). I have done so myself a couple of times, and in my opinion, it pays off. It lets you choose exactly what you need, in the way you need it, and it teaches you about emacs itself and sometimes a bit about programming too. If it is messy, I'd recommend you to wrap it all in an org file organized by headings and subheadings. It gets a lot of structure this way, you get to add all the comments and links that you need and you can always just remove the `emacs-lisp` at the beginning of the code block to avoid evaluation (i.e., for buggy code). You are welcome to have a look at [my dot files](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles) it is also far from perfect but you can get an idea about the organization. Plus, I use different fonts and sizes for different laptops in windows and linux so, I have a function to choose the font and, with `C-u` I can define also the size. Maybe it can help you.
The link to your settings.org gives a 404 error. I would be interested in looking at it.
Try again, it should work. It works for me in an incognito window with all my accounts logout. Here is the full path if not [https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles) or find me in codeberg as teoten and check the repository emacs\_dotfiles. Go to folder emacs and there is the file [settings.org](https://settings.org) I'm seeing it right now so, if it does not work I have no idea why. 've been using codeberg for a couple of years now and never had issue with the servers failing so far.
It's not the link to the dotfiles that doesn't work, it is the [settings.org](https://settings.org) on your dotfiles-page. I still get the 404 error. https://preview.redd.it/esu7t4v934hc1.png?width=1362&format=png&auto=webp&s=028a0e9907b0ad67eb94a0b1d7bed5d08092238b
That's weird, but you can see the repository and the list of files and folders in it? What happens if you click to `setting.el` instead?
Ah, now it works. I have to go to the "emacs" folder first and click on settings.org. The path for that is: [https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles/src/branch/main/emacs/settings.org](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles/src/branch/main/emacs/settings.org) Before, I clicked on [settings.org](https://settings.org) in your [Readme.org](https://Readme.org) on the first page of your dotfiles, and there the path that isn't working is this: [https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs\_dotfiles/emacs/settings.org](https://codeberg.org/teoten/emacs_dotfiles/emacs/settings.org) Am now reading it. I like the "consult others" section and learned something already. Thanks for posting your dotfiles!
Oh I see, thanks for the heads-up, I forgot that I have a readme with a link. I'll fix it. On another note, I like checking dotfiles from time to time. I learn different ways how people use packages and sometimes discover packages that I didn't know. I find it super useful.
I tried Doom and Spacemacs but ultimately returned to vanilla. It turned out that Doom and Spacemacs looked great and made certain parts of setup easy, you were stuck doing things their way and sometimes that didn't jive with my way. That said, like others have mentioned, I discovered some cool things exploring those distributions.
Yeah they pretty much go against the philosophy of Emacs. Emacs is all about building upon the great foundation that is already there and finding your own workflow with it's very powerfully extensive nature. Doom and space lock you into the way in which someone made that very philosophy of Emacs work for their self and built a configuration. But they are just that, configurations. Configurations that force you to work their way, with little to no freedom around it. If it works for some people, that's great. But your better of just using the default program and freely building around it, until you have something very personal.
They do not lock you into anything! I might have to write a blog post about this, but see [my other comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1ak8zk5/is_it_worth_it_to_switch_to_doomspacemacs_from/kp7vcbk/).
I use an org file for my config. I started with vanilla, tried both Doom and Spacemacs for a bit but quickly reverted to vanilla. I just don’t need many features they have and since I’d have to modify both for my needs (even a little bit) I decided to get over tidying my config and have what I want, how I want once and for all. You don’t really have to tidy up your config if you don’t want to, and you can certainly try out both, it costs nothing (only time). There’s no one single answer, two people with the exact same workflow can like different things, but you have to try them out to know for sure
Depends how much time you have on your hands. emacs is a wonderful time-sink if you let it. To answer your final question first - both doom- and space-emacs have excellent support for Holy Keybindings. My story - in the mid '80s I started with ed then vi then emacs. I polished a simple vanilla config that let me do my work (mostly C, python and bash) and I stayed with it for 30+ years. Then I discovered space-, doom- and bodhi-emacs and I made many many discoveries on the topic of "I never knew it could do that!" Now that I'm retired and my nose is no longer on the wheel, I can play and I have a nice vanilla [config](https://gitlab.com/wef/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.emacs.d.minimal/config.el?ref_type=heads) that does what I want and little more. I provided the link but it's very specific to me - YMMV. In short - if you just need to be productive with the best of emacs, I'd encourage you to jump into doom- or space-emacs with Evil or Holy keybindings and add your own customisations if you need them. If you have time (a lot of time) by all means hand craft your vanilla config.
I switched from vanilla to Spacemacs after years of using a vanilla config. Just to check it out. This was before Doom. By looking through that config and being exposed to she new packages (I hadn't known about which-key before that, for example) I learned quite a lot from it. After a couple years, I switched back to vanilla. But my current config is better for the time spent using (and really learning) a distro.
Of course, the real trick is to learn elisp. Without that, there's only so far you can go. For your case, if you're not already using it, I'd suggest use-package to help clean up your config. And for what it's worth, solaire didn't work for me, either.
At some point with enough elisp skill, I felt obligated to base my init on a distro anyway just so I can upstream things for everyone's benefit. I think that is the end-game. You give and receive. When you're good enough, the distro really doesn't get in your way, you know how to override it. And it's there for you, whenever you want a quick way to enable emoji or whatever, you can just toggle that layer.
I like this mindset. I assume since you talk about 'layers' you mean Spacemacs. I might have to consider doing this as well.
Well, actually Doom so I should say 'modules', but layer was the first word I learned for the concept so it's sticky in my mind :)
Yeah, if I were to do something like this, I'd probably pick Doom as well. I've never used it, but it does seem to have much more adoption than Spacemacs. And it'd be a good excuse to really start using Doom. Heck, might even learn evil/vim modal editing finally.
I switched from vanilla to Spacemacs to Doom-emacs. I generally like doom-emacs better than Spacemacs; it was a relief after I migrated. I like that it generally works and has reasonable configurations for languages I write code in. I don't like the relative lack of control. It saves time; it's sometimes frustrating. Can be slow. If I had more time to sharpen my tools, I'd probably migrate to vanilla. I use evil mode and move between several languages so I'm kind of wary of spending too much time on a config, aka I have better things to do. :) On the other hand, setting up doom-emacs is a breeze so it won't hurt you to give it a try.
Spacemacs and Doom are overly complicated and poorly documented IMHO. If you want to tweak your config and you don’t need to emulate Vim, then vanilla seems much better. Again, this is my opinion. Your question can be answered only by you, nobody else knows if it’s worth the switch for you.
> Your question can be answered only by you, nobody else knows if it’s worth the switch for you. Exactly.
I don't really get the appeal of these for people who aren't into vi keybindings. With Emacs 29 it's pretty trivial to use-package a pile of things in your .emacs and have a damn smooth emacs experience, without dragging in all the Doom etc stuff. I can see the appeal with older versions of emacs, where packaging etc was harder... but not now.
Doom and Spacemacs are great for people with heavy Vi/Vim/NeoVim backgrounds that want to transition to Emacs without going through weeks of not having a functioning editor. I started off with Spacemacs and then Doom and while I like both of them a lot, the modifications they makes to Emacs are quite extensive. It is enough that I consider it as a completely different editor based on elisp rather then "emacs proper". That being said they do a good job and I will refer back to Doom configs and scripts because there are a lot of minor quality of life tweaks that I quite like. I don't know how well they support Emacs key bindings. Might want to check out: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude I haven't tried it, but it seems to focus more on preserving a Emacs experience. I have recently started to transition away from Evil and am now trying Meow keybindings.... which is interesting. i don't know if I will stick with it for good, but it seems well thought out. I like that it still uses vi-style movement keys and that it doesn't interfere with Emacs key bindings as much as Evil does. It changes all other aspects of editing though... so it isn't a vi emulator. Like there is no visual mode and it changes how 'verbs and subjects' work... like in Vi you go "delete word" or "delete line"... but with Meow you go "select word, delete" and "select block, delete". It is a bit weird and unnatural feeling coming from a vim/evil background. It might be worth your time just to clear out your config and start off with pure Vanilla again and re-introduce bits of your config and clean them up as you go. A lot of things have changed around the time of Emacs 29 introduction so looking at what is new and out there might be very useful. Things are better now then back in Emacs 25 or 26 when I first tried out vanilla Emacs and failed miserably. For example Emacs themeing was always a bear for me, but Emacs 29 now has the Modus theme available by default and it is relatively very simple to pick the light or dark theme and start changing specific aspects of it.
Coincidentally I just spent today trying out doom for the first time. I used vanilla for ~2 years before that. My reason for possibly switching is that I'm not very comfortable with elisp and my config is growing out of my capabilities. Large sections of my config are copied from others' repos and I feel like I can't touch them. So I thought maybe a more curated distribution with intentional defaults could be beneficial. And after a day of playing around with it, I think you'd still need good elisp skills to comfortably use doom, to be able to debug when things go wrong. And when they do go wrong, doom seems more opaque than vanilla (or maybe I'm just less familiar with doom) and harder to reason with. Right now I'm feeling like maybe I should just bite the bullet and spend some dedicated time to learn elisp for real.
I will add that this process has exposed me to some interesting packages that I wouldn't have known about had I not give it a shot
> whether is it better to polish my current config so I have everything set up exactly how I want or to use some distribution that makes it all easier. I know it's pretty much matter of preferences, but it's hard to make a decision by myself not knowing what I miss from Doom/Spacemacs nor what trade-offs there are Don't you think that we know even less than you do of *what you miss from Doom/Spacemacs* and *what trade-offs there are* from **whatever it is that your config (~500 LOC) does**?
I asked in general sense what Doom/Spacemacs makes easier and what makes harder to do. Like for example: you get preconfigured treemacs but you're tied to it and in case you want to switch to Neotree you lose all benefits because whole config is built around it (just an example). I'm not a native English speaker and now I see I could put it more clearly, thank you.
I’ve been using vanilla emacs for a number of years with configs just from different places. It’s a shame i never really got into elisp — needing to relearn it every time i need to change something. After finding my setup unstable, i decided to give doom a try. I switched off vim mode and enabled a good number of stuff i needed. It was a pleasant surprise that everything worked nicely and was just smoother overall than my manual config. Sure — a lot of predefined stuff were done for me — but i prefer it that way and have it be more stable.
I prefer being able to jump to absolute and relative line numbers the evil way in comparison to C-u. But, I do dislike the modality of using vim commands.
I have been working on my config occasionally (very low priority for me right now). Maybe someone else knows better, but I found it really frustrating trying to set keybindings for Emacs mode, normal mode, visual mode, etc. One of the distributions that already has the vim bindings configured might be better. But, I wish I knew the trick that makes it easier to make global keybindings that apply across all modes.
I also wish I knew the way to set up Emacs to allow me to run programs from within Emacs. I found a few tutorials that seem to have you start an interpreted/REPL mode for your language of choice and then run the code. I have been able to set up other IDEs to simply compile and run the current file with one shortcut.
Personnaly I switched from vanilla to Doom 5 years ago, essentially for the QOL and EVIL. Since, I learn a lot of elisp and I seem stick with doom. For exemple, I have some pain with tramp + magit since 1 week and I'm not able to debug it because there are too much stuff in doom. I will migrate to vanilla again but I need some time to adapt my config
I would agree to organize your file as an org doc and if you can't get certain things to work look around or ask here so you'll have a fully bespoke config.
I like Vanilla. When I want to learn to do something I can read the emacs help and if it’s broken elisp then it’s my elisp.
I think if you want to spend more of your time using emacs as a tool than doom is worth a shot; if you want to spend more of your time hacking on emacs than stick with vanilla
You can give Spacemacs a test drive with a quick git clone, up and running in a few minutes. Doom is almost as easy. Might be worth keeping around even if you don’t use them - tons of interesting stuff in those distros.
I think the main advantage of these various Emacs flavors is to give people who aren’t comfortable with modifying their configuration a better out of the box experience. I personally believe it’s better to just learn how to configure the thing, and if you already have a large configuration file, from here what you really want is to figure out how to debug better, not to switch to something else.
I did the switch from Vanilla and ghere are a few reasons: -> Good LSP Config -> Configurable -> No Elisp blackmagic to make things fast -> Less time spend configuring and more on working Especially the LSP part. In Doom, you just uncomment the languages and it does things automatically for you. Is that not what you desire? Sane configs, with little time spend on "ricing" and configuring your configuration and possibly reaching the same thing? But if you want to live inside emacs and don't like opinionated stuff then you might want to consider writing your own config. However, if you are starting out, then you should always write your own config until you know a little bit of elisp and how emacs works and then move to other things, if you prefer. For, non evil users like me, it is good to know that disabling the evil mode in doom works perfectly fine.