A Vim User Explores Emacs Distributions

Paul Kuruvilla is a recent immigrant to Emacs from Vim. Of course, that’s a familiar story—along with those going in the opposite direction—and wouldn’t be worth commenting on except for Kuruvilla’s take on the three main Emacs “distributions:” Vanilla Emacs, Spacemacs, and Doom Emacs. His observations are interesting because those of us safely ensconced in the Emacs world become blind to the problems that these variations present to a new user.

As a long time Vim user, Kuruvilla decided against abandoning his Vim muscle memory and opted for packages with Vi emulation. He liked the descriptions he found of Spacemacs and decided to give it a go. Standard Spacemacs seemed too bloated and complicated for his needs so he tried Spacemacs-base. The problems began when he tried to add more functionality. It wasn’t as seamless a process as he would have liked so he tried standard Spacemacs instead.

He found standard Spacemacs to be too bloated and significantly slower for some tasks. He also found that it would sometimes freeze in the middle of editing files. That’s not acceptable, of course, so he took a look at Doom Emacs.

Doom is famously targeted specifically at former Vim users and Kuruvilla found that although it required more work to set up, it met his needs better than Spacemacs. He’s now a happy Emacs user in the camp of the Doom adherents.

As many of you know, I was also a long time Vim user but when I came to Emacs more than a decade ago, I decided to embrace Emacs entirely and chose Vanilla Emacs. I haven’t regretted that choice for an instant but I am aware that some Vanilla Emacs users have migrated to Spacemacs, Doom, or one of the Vi emulation modes to deal with repetitive stress issues.

I know some Irreal readers are ardent Spacemacs users and swear by it so I was a bit surprised at Kuruvilla’s problems with it. If you’re a Spacemacs user and have seen to same problems, leave a comment. Or if you’re a Spacemacs user and haven’t seen those problems, also leave a comment. In the mean time, welcome, Mr. Kuruvilla, to the Emacs family.

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