Clojurians Log v2

During the holidays I have been giving emacs another try to be my main dev tool. I really like spacemacs since it feels more familiar to me (I have been using IntelliJ and vscode). I would also like to try out doom emacs since I have been reading good stuff about it and one of my colleagues is using it. Have you tried doom and what is your opinion about it as a spacemacs user? Have you missed some features that you have in spacemacs but not in doom?

@janne.sauvala I have tried Doom a few times over the last year. My favourite thing about Doom is the mode-line theme, which I now use with Spacemacs. Doom itself is missing too many tools for me to be productive. These things could be added / configured in Doom with some work, but that is simply duplicating what is in Spacemacs or having to manage more custom configuration. I find Doom much slower to use as the key binding mnemonics do not make as much sense as the Spacemacs key design. Yes, startup time is notably faster after the initial install, but startup time is trivial compared to the speed I can go when Emacs is running. I rarely restart Emacs anyway and there is Emacs client. If someone wants minimal features and has a strong preferrence for Ivy over Helm, then they maybe some advantages to Doom. From discussions, the most common advantage is the view that it's simpler to customize Doom, as there are very few abstractions on top of Emacs and it packages. My own experience suggest it's a lot more work to start using rather Doom (partly because of the customisation I would require). I assume as more people use Doom, some things will be added, but unless something bad happens with Spacemacs, I don't have the time to spare to craft the same experience in Doom as I already have in Spacemacs.

Thanks for the insightful response. I have followed your spacemacs guides and your configs were a huge inspiration. Your videos was one of the reasons I have been giving emacs another try. I’m a huge fan of the mnemonic key bindings in spacemacs and it is good to know that doom customization would require extra time to get it bar with spacemacs. I’m still learning emacs in general and I’m grateful for every thing I don’t need to configure myself. This makes me to feel comfortable to keep investing in spacemacs. 🙂

I will review Doom again sometime in 2021 as I am sure both projects will continue to evolve. However, I suspect it's the Spacemac key binding that will keep me productive throughout the year.