There are many, many posts on Irreal about the journey that people make from the hinterlands to Emacs. This post is about the journey from uber-distributions like Spacemacs and Doom to plain old vanilla Emacs. Irreal doesn’t hold any position, political or otherwise, on what distribution you should use. We’re content to let each user find his or her own Nirvana.
Still, it’s true that many converts come first to Doom or Spacemacs because they find it a bit more familiar and comfortable. Plenty of those people find a permanent home in one of those distributions and live happily ever after. Others, though, still hear the siren song of traditional Emacs and eventually complete their journey by adopting vanilla Emacs.
Donovan Ratefison has a post that recounts his own journey. He has a nice metaphor involving drinking tea. When he first started drinking tea he liked it with lots of sugar. Eventually he discovered that the sugar was masking the true taste and aroma of the tea. The raw tea was, perhaps, an acquired taste but once acquired it opened up a whole new world or tastes and sensations to him.
So it was with Emacs. Ratefison tried both Spacemacs and Doom and liked them both but vanilla Emacs kept calling to him. He like may others decided that he wanted a minimal configuration where he understood everything and there were no packages that he didn’t actually need and use.
He includes a copy of his init.el and it is, indeed, simple. He loads only a few packages. He will probably find the need for additional packages as his Emacs use matures. That, at least, has been my experience but it seems that he has found, as with tea, that unsweetened Emacs is better.
Update : Added link to Ratefison’s post. Thanks—again—to Sacha.