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>Maintaining a complex Emacs config is a chore. I have given up and adopted Doom Emacs. Let cleverer people do the wrangling

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I feel like Doom is maybe obsolescent on account of standard out of the box emacs having fairly easy to set up these days, with themes and LSP and etc just there out of the box and package-install just working.

But also I have absolutely zero desire to run with modal keybindings, which seems to be Doom's schtick.

That's also why I don't use it. It's not bad at all! It's just not how I want to use Emacs. It's not right for me.

I sure do get the appeal of an out-of-the-box Emacs setup that does everything with modern defaults, but the base installation gets better, more ergonomic, and more powerful by the year on its own.

"out-of-the-box Emacs setup" was never a thing that lured me into trying it. I liked the idea of modularity with Doom. Before that I never knew where to put things, how to split them, how to make them work with one another, how to disable features without breaking some others.

I have learned tons of things since then and on multiple occasions I thought about rebuilding things (with my now more extended knowledge) from scratch, but I'm afraid I will inevitably end up borrowing some core Doom macros, and end up recreating something that very much looks and feels like Doom, without being Doom, perhaps with a different package manager. That I believe is the only non-negotiable part of it today. Other than that, Doom is nothing but a very thin layer of abstraction. I don't even use Doom's own modules, instead I built the set of my own. Anyway, if you ever feel overwhelmed and decide to call another emacs.d bankruptcy, maybe give Doom a try. You can disable all the modules and build on top of that lean core, it still has objectively nice features - CLI tool is nice, macros like map! and add-hook! and defadvice! are very cool. It loads extremely fast, etc.

No, Doom is not a final product of some sort. Going back to my "kitchen" analogy, Doom is like a recipe book - it's great for some ideation (you can check for example what kind of things used in Python module and build your own, or extend existing, 'official' module). It offers you some modularity - Doom-based configs are great for breaking down into reusable components. Doom's core also contains a lot of very nifty macros that allow you to reduce otherwise unavoidable boilerplate. Other than that, Doom is just the regular, good old Emacs - you still can do everything you could do before, with perhaps some better structure and code ergonomics.

Doom may become obsolete only if it keeps partitioning into separate packages, e.g., doom-modeline started as a core component of Doom, now it's a separate package. Similarly, nothing really preventing anyone from forking other core parts of Doom into separate packages.

Also, evil-mode keys are optional, anyone can use Doom without using vim keys, there's still good value in doing that.

> fairly easy

Very subjective. I understand the rite-of-passage impulse to build one's own config. But it is simply too much time/effort investment if you are relatively new. This I say as someone who had my own config for a couple of decades.

When I came across Doom, I threw mine away and just adopted it. I even learned to like VIM/VI style text editing to use Doom effectively.

I also like the GodMode/Leader/Model style of text editing. The keybindings are more intuitive and more discoverable. When I enter a key and wait a bit, doom pops up next available options. I no longer memorize the keybindings. Just use the whichkey integration to find things I use infrequently.

Not to mention that it is well tested with the sets of packages for each release.

Obviously, not for everyone.

But I am a happy user and hope it exists for a long while.

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