Separate install/config for safe experimentation.

Hi all, It's been around a year since I jumped into Doom with no prior Emacs experience, so far I've become quite comfortable with using org mode (with evil) for writing reports. At this point I'm really interested in learning more about emacs, and possibly starting from scratch, as I've heard it's much better for learning than a pre-rolled config. Thing is, the few things that I've tried to do so far often ended up breaking my thesis setup, and I'm pretty hesitant to further experiment since "I broke my text editor, so I didn't meet the deadline" is really not a risk I want to take. My goal is to somehow have a separate vanilla emacs installation/configuration, that I can just tweak from scratch, but which is totally isolated from the installation/configuration that I use to write my thesis. What would be a good (important: foolproof) way to accomplish this?

Chemacs. If I wasn’t on my phone I’d offer a link but it’s exactly what you want for this.

https://github.com/plexus/chemacs2

Thanks for the Chemacs answers! Was looking for this too

Beyond `chemacs` like others have said, it's also useful to manage your config with a version control system, such as Git. That way, changes are much easier to roll back.

Thanks for the suggestions, looks like Chemacs is definitely the way to go! Also, version controlling my config seems like a great idea.