What is the appeal for doom emacs?

I was able to go from using nvim to using Doom Emacs and achieve the same level of productivity in a few days. But now I have things like org mode, magit, and an operating system. How do I tried to adopt vanilla Emacs, I would’ve never succeeded.

I guess many people will develop the urge to try emacs after seeing someone proficient in it or watching a video with someone who has a nice theme and a lot of packages integrated into their routine workflow, so things look rather smooth.. Doom gives you that experience out of the box while vanilla emacs can feel quite.. erm.. bland, even though you quickly get a feeling for the power that's waiting for you under the hood.. but getting from a vanilla emacs to something that feels as comfortable as your right hand can take a couple of years and some commitment, so doom is probably just a shortcut to getting to grips with emacs.. Just like I know quite a few people who started out with oh-my-zsh and later on just went with plain zsh and a couple selected functions from oh-my-zsh, leading to a nice and comfortable shell without the slowdown of oh-my-zsh.

I am using it as a platform because it is faster and more robust and well put together than what I have been able to do myself. ​ Not using Evil. I have two separate configurations (Chemacs2 FTW!) where one is for creative writing, and one is for programming (LSP!) - I don't feel that Doom-Emacs limits me in any way. Jethro Kuan (Org-roam) writes about why he migrated to Doom-Emacs here: https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/migrating\_to\_doom\_emacs/

I can to doom after a year or two of my own vanilla config, and I think that was a great order to do things in. I think of it more like a configuration framework than a distribution because it really provides a great set of functions for lazily loading packages in the right order and I’m a big fan of the AOT compilation it provides. Coming into it after already learning emacs is perfect because you already know what to ask for and the tools are right there. I’m not sure how it would have felt to someone using it as their first emacs setup.

I don't have time to keep up with all the various packages that can be used with emacs, configure those packages, or keep those packages updated. Doom does that for me.

*And* well integrated.

I tried finding all the packages and doing the configuration myself and I kept breaking my own config. Now I just break doom emacs and their lack of documentation. It's alright if you don't feel like finding all the packages yourself.

I can say for myself I was drawn to emacs for org-mode, which has less than adequate support in the vim universe. However I was not interested in learning all the emacs key combos etc. Doom-emacs was a great in-between that offered an interface I was comfortable with, and a relatively gradual learning curve. Yes evil mode can do a lot of that but doom was a more complete package with easier configuration (imo). I want to say it helped with boot time of emacs as well, but I can't remember how much I tried that. Maybe that was coming from Spacemacs...