I use Doom emacs and I'm thinking of wiping it and starting with a fresh config looking for info on where to start

First thing I want is evil mode and themes other than that I use emacs for org-mode for notes and maybe one day actually writing that novel I've been meaning to write. I also do some programming mainly python and bash scripting while going in and modifying Linux dot files. So mainly I'm looking for tutorials and websites that can help with this

Well, im gona go with the family and say [System Crafters YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/channel/UCAiiOTio8Yu69c3XnR7nQBQ). He's got a few Emacs from scratch videos. Have fun. Happy hacking.

The world is your oyster. For themes, the easiest way is to use the menu, Options: Customize Emacs: Custom Themes. If you want more, do "M-x list-packages" and then "C-s theme". There are tons of them. The "modus-themes" are just so darned excellent in my opinion. But the Doom themes and Doom modeline, are also available if you feel the need. In addition to the System Crafters videos, [Mastering Emacs](https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is a great site to learn from.

System Crafters - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAiiOTio8Yu69c3XnR7nQBQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAiiOTio8Yu69c3XnR7nQBQ) This is probably a good start, very thorough and he is pretty much covering configuring a custom emacs config easily. I went from spacemacs to a custom config for a year and it drove me crazy and went to doom. There's always hope, and I probably will try again. I think in the end you'll end up with a structure similar to all pre-configured emacs where you have functions that do common things, "layer" like configurations for the different languages, and probably optimizing. Or you should at least, otherwise it might escape your control quickly.

> the easiest way is to use the menu Is it? I found the easiest was to copy another well established theme, replace the palette then remove the unused faces

I didn't have much trouble. For better or worse I have slowly recreated my vim config in emacs using snippets from google. Spent some time learning Common Lisp which helped make me more comfortable with Elisp, but of course that is NOT a requirement. If you have had any interaction with Vimscript you will find Elisp to be much easier and more fun to deal with. As a side note, I honestly still edit config files in vim/neovim but that's just me. Only saying it b/c you mentioned evil mode. ​ EDIT: here's the book I used for Common Lisp. Good fun. http://landoflisp.com/

If you ask me I would just start experimenting - but don't blow away your doom config until you feel like what you have is working well for you. Use something like [https://github.com/plexus/chemacs](https://github.com/plexus/chemacs) to run your from-scratch config in parallel so you have time to compare what you like. I did a similar thing - and I dug through the doom code in the process to pick out some packages that I liked that doom was using. I learned about them and just started to use some of them directly in my from-scratch config.

I'm talking about how to try out different themes. Seems like you're talking about how to create a new theme based on an existing one?

Ah yes absolutely

And he's currently working on a series of videos configuring emacs with only standard pacakages, which highlights a lot of things people just skip over.

system crafters (emacs from scratch) and chemacs is a great start, so you don't have to stop your workflow with doom emacs that was my use case, now I have my personal config

I publish my own on github, but it's heavily personalized so I don't really want to advertise myself indiscriminately. What you can do is to google curated personal .emacs configurations, and pick and choose from the ones that most closely match your needs and taste.

I also recommend this apart from System Crafters stuff: https://github.com/a-schaefers/spartan-emacs

I agree that System Crafters is the way to go. David Wilson does a great job of explaining as he ges along. Also, don't forget to add Prot to the list.... I find his approach practical.

I'm gonna be straight with you, and tell you that getting rid of Doom and starting over from scratch just isn't worth it. Try messing around with the hooks activated for the major modes that you're having issues with. Doom is pretty well-optimized and a lot of time has been devoted to making it just work for every scenario. I wouldn't be so adamant about you not abandoning doom if you hadn't mentioned that you still wanted to use evil.