Doom Emacs -- introduction and first impression

I recently switched from Spacemacs to an Emacs distribution that is closer to vanilla, but still offers a lot of abstraction making it easier to use and configure: Doom Emacs. I will talk about my first impressions after the switch, explain what makes Doom great and how it works.

Why an Emacs distribution?

coming from vim, I wanted certain things like evil-mode out of the box

the Emacs ecosystem has

• a huge list of packages
• multiple packages for almost any task, e.g.
  • helm vs ivy vs ido (completion frameworks)
  • package managers: use-package, straight, el-get, borg, …

therefore, an opinionated collection cannot hurt!

major evilified distributions to choose from:

• Spacemacs
• Doom Emacs

Why I went the Spacemacs way first

Spacemacs has the larger community

Doom is basically just a one-man show

It is also “more complete”

A lot more packages bundled as so-called layers

Doom advertises itself as being closer to metal

… and I wanted as little fuss as possible

What went wrong?

Complicated processes for customization

• A feature is not already in Spacemacs?
• “The best way would be to create your own layer!” is what I read often
• Creating layers is way too much overhead

Complicated config file

• the default Spacemacs config is already 500 lines
• spread over multiple functions, user-config, user-init, user-load
• variables of packages in layers are configured in another function
• hard to keep the file coherent

I often stumbled over customize-variable

• Spacemacs saves the customized stuff in the .spacemacs file
• It often happened to me that things appeared there that I didn’t want

Rolling release often broke my Emacs

Spacemacs is slow.

• Feature-completeness also means a lot is loaded by default
• The startup time is not really optimized
• It often feels sluggish and it’s hard to poinpoint the problem without going too deep into Emacs debugging

Why Doom makes Emacs great again

Enter Doom Emacs

• A configuration framework for Emacs
• conceived and maintained by Henrik Lissner
• runs its own package management system on top of straight
• comes with a standard library to simplify configuration

What is Doom’s philosophy?

• “Gotta go fast.”
• “Close to metal.”
• “Opinionated, but not stubborn.”
• “Your system, your rules.”
• “Nix/Guix is a great idea!”

Gotta go fast

• Doom is blazingly fast
• the startup time can compete with vim
• but how?
  • avoids gc at startup
  • specialized mechanism to concatenate autoloads
  • lazy load package management
  • lazy load stuff when Emacs is idle
  • some more technical stuff

Close to metal

• much less abstraction in the config files
• well-documented set of additional functions (see demo later)

Opinionated, but not stubborn

• it’s actually easy to override defaults, just like in vanilla
• customize system is turned off!
• builtin mechanism to trigger initializing code with a variant of setq

Your system, your rules

• Spacemacs sometimes compiles system dependencies
• Doom is designed not to, and to force plugins not to either
• doom doctor will tell you what’s missing

Nix/Guix is a great idea!

• Doom comes with a binary (actually a shell script running an Emacs lisp program), doom
• doom sync is comparable to nixos-rebuild switch for those familiar with nix
• reads the config files
• downloads all the packages, which are pinned (no rolling release!)
• generates the actual Emacs configuration

Demo

First impression (after a few weeks)

I’m never going back

• Doom strikes the perfect balance for me
• Arguably better defaults than Spacemacs
• “module” set (pre-configured packages) not as large as Spacemacs, but sufficient

Minor quirks/issues

• A few keybindings are not very “spacemacy” (but that’s easy to fix!)
• The main support channel is via Discord, which might put off some people
• Don’t expect bugs to be fixed quickly, or documentation to be complete