Jethro Kuan, whom I wrote about in regards to his work with smart notes, has another interesting post. This time it’s about his migration to Doom Emacs. There’s nothing unusual about that of course; I’ve written several posts about such migrations. What’s a (little bit) different about Kuan’s journey is that he started from vanilla Emacs instead of Vim like most such immigrants.
Of course, many Emacs users have started using Spacemacs or Doom because of RSI issues. The attraction for them is the Vim keybindings, which most people find easier on their wrists and fingers. That was not Kuan’s motivation, though. He turned off evil mode and is still using the normal Emacs keybindings.
Kuan is interested in simplifying his configuration and using as much of the built-in Emacs functionality as possible. He says that Doom is faster and more responsive than vanilla Emacs and loads faster. I’ve never understood the obsession with Emacs’ load speed. After all, most of us just leave it running—at least in server mode–all the time so a few seconds of load time in the morning doesn’t amount to much. I was a bit surprised that Doom is more responsive. It is, after all, just a prebuilt Emacs configuration. It’s probably a matter of Doom getting things like load order right.
In any event, if you feel like experimenting with your editor, trying Doom may be more advantageous then wasting your time on one of those other editors. Kuan says it took him about 2 hours to complete the migration and then he spent another hour tweaking it to his liking so it’s reasonably low cost to experiment if you feel inclined.