Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another Emacs Podcast. He’s got a new website and—in accordance with the cunning plan devised by the Emacs mandarins—has been seduced into using Hugo and Emacs to post to it. The plan was so successful that he’s also moved his other sites over to the same model.
After a brief discussion of the need for all of us to support those selfless souls who labor for free on behalf of Free and Open Source software, he moves on to the podcast’s main topics: Spacemacs and Doom. He gives a very balanced account of the pros and cons of each distribution and discusses why you might want to use one.
His main conclusion is that Spacemacs in particular is aimed at immigrants from the Vim world. It’s certainly possible for a n00b to start with Spacemacs but Davletkaliyev thinks that unless you’re coming from Vim it’s probably better to start with vanilla Emacs. Listen to the podcast for his reasoning about that. Even so, many beginners, after spending some time trying to grow their own configurations, may find the preconfigured environments in Spacemacs or Doom a better fit for their needs and move to one of them.
He doesn’t discuss one of the major reasons folks experienced with vanilla Emacs move to Evil, Spacemacs, or Doom: RSI problems. There’s no doubt that the Vim keybindings are much easier on your wrists than the Emacs ones are. Still, many of us have used vanilla Emacs for many years without a problem so whether or not this is an issue will vary with the individual.
The podcast is 36 minutes so plan accordingly.