Two weeks of Doom Emacs

At the beginning of July, Doom Emacs^🔗 became my main text editor as an experiment. This was on my to-do list for months, and there hasn’t been a more perfect time for me to try out a completely new environment than now.

The ecosystem

This article mainly serves as an update. It’s been around a year since I found out about Doom Emacs, and I even used it for a couple of months for taking notes during extra networking course in which I was partaking. Initially I used Markdown for taking notes, but ended up switching over to org-mode^🔗 after a couple of lectures and never went back.

Next to org-mode, another great package is magit^🔗. I absolutely love magit. It is a phenomenal tool, and even though I had short exposure to it, it became obvious why so many people say it’s one of the best things about Emacs. Working with Git without magit will never look the same to me.

And, of course, the evil^🔗 mode itself. It’s the best (re)implementation of Vim that I’ve had the pleasure of using! When paired with other evil packages in Doom, I would be lying if I said that it doesn’t feel like Vim or that it falls short at something. Without it, the chances of me trying out Emacs would be close to zero as I prefer modal editing over playing Emacs piano.

How about configuration? Unlike other editors that I’ve used in the past, the configuration is done in the same language the editor itself is written in. This was intimidating at first, but after looking at other configurations, as well as the Elisp manual, it slowly started to make more sense. I do hope to use Elisp for some slightly bigger things in the future.

Additional thoughts

The journey so far has been great. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I love it, and it’s so much fun! It kind of brings me back to the early days of learning Vim – you get used to it as you try different things out, and the more you use it. Some people may disagree with defaults because Doom Emacs is opinionated, but I find them really well thought-out. Besides, it’s easy enough to customize just about everything!

[…] your editor configuration is the biggest project in your life.

– source^🔗

After spending two weeks using only Emacs, I can begin to see why the speaker in this presentation has this quote on the closing slide. Even if you’re using some other editor, your editor configuration is indeed the biggest project in your life because you might be spending hours on a daily basis working with it.

Closing words

I’m very excited for the future because I barely even scratched the surface of Emacs and its ecosystem for the short time I’ve been using it. If you’re interested, you can check out my configuration^🔗; there isn’t much to it for the time being, but I’m experimenting with a bunch of things and will be adding my changes in the future.