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Comment by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF | Hacker News Reader

This looks nice!

One thing I always like to note when it comes to the topic of emacs configurations: Mine has steadily gotten smaller and smaller the longer I used emacs.

I'm a relatively new user. I started with Spacemacs, switched to doom emacs, and more recently finally crafted my own config.

The evolution of my .emacs.d was a constant "Do I really need a plugin/preconfiguration for this?" and for me the answer was "no" most of the time once I researched it, so I removed it and either switched to the default, or emacs builtin functionality.

Nowadays my config is ~130 lines as well, which includes a few lines of documentation and notes since my config is an org file. If I had to trim it down further (or set up a config from scratch to get to work as fast as possible) I'd say that I could trim it down to only a few lines.

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> I'm a relatively new user. I started with Spacemacs, switched to doom emacs, and more recently finally crafted my own config.

I use Spacemacs (and I like it). For people who switched over to Doom Emacs, I like asking them why did they switch over? What were your reasons?

For me Doom Emacs was much faster and just seemed to have saner default configurations. The developer is also incredibly responsive and helpful.

I'm coming from Vim, so having evil-mode as a first-class integration is nice too.

I rolled my own emacs config when I started out, for the first 3 years or so. When I saw spacemacs I liked the entire kitchen sink approach, it opened my brain up to a lot of the functionality of emacs/packages that I wasn't touching.

When I saw Doom Emacs though I was kind of skeptical at first (this was about 5 years ago), it seemed to have a lot less batteries included, but I gave it chance anyway, longing after the understanding I got when I wrote my own config. I've been entirely happy daily driving it since. Doom Emacs just seems to have a different philosophy than Spacemacs, it's more like a really well designed configuration framework for emacs on which there are nice layers on top instead of the more monolithic Spacemacs approach. I can easily configure it to my needs, write my own custom modules, and hack on it. It really does a sane job updating and managing the packages, something I would waste too much time on with Spacemacs. So to me is that it seems lower level and better software, yet I still get the preconfigured functionality that allows me to quickly go take an emacs install from zero to hero in a matter of minutes. And did I mention? It's fast.

Spacemacs was what convinced me to switch from vim to Emacs. However, I found Spacemacs to be unstable and regularly had all kinds of annoying issues. This is quite some years ago, so perhaps things have gotten better.

However, having experienced Evil, Magit, general.el etc. there was no way back. For a while I used my own Emacs configuration that emulated many parts of Spacemacs, but was far more stable.

However, maintaining my own configuration became a bit of a drag. Every time you need another package, you have to figure out how it works and how it can be integrated nicely with Evil/general.el, etc. So, one day I decided to try Doom and I haven't really looked back. It has many of the perks of Spacemacs (sane defaults, space-driven shortcuts), but has been very solid and stable.

doom emacs lazy loads modules, and everything they do they consider "performance" when adding packages. Mine config loads on a 6 year old PC in 0.5 seconds. Also they make it a bit more manual to update and control when you want to sync/update. The "doctor" feature has helped me find "broken" install reasons. I don't think it's a "knock the ball out of the park" against space-emacs, but I like the way it works better. It also works well with jit and the new "native emacs" branch. It think they are also working closely with emacs-ng on another branch of emacs which is much more radical.

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