Is it a good idea to just start with Doomemacs?

So I tried out vanilla Emacs for the first time in many years to get a good grasp on fundamentals before moving on to more advanced topics and the keybindings are just as terrible as I remember them being. I know Doomemacs offers a more Vim-like experience but I worried about getting lost without knowing more basics. So I was wondering whether it's a good path to basically just consider Doomemacs its own experience and start from there, as it were the basic editor?

Doom is a really good vim implementation, but for learning emacs fundamentals and building a config I'd recommend the original Emacs from Scratch from System Crafters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw). He takes you through mitigating and replacing the vanilla defaults. If videos aren't your thing, check the description for the specific git commit and show notes.

I've never used vanilla emacs, just spacemacs, and I'm doing perfectly fine.

If you're already familiar with Vim keybindings and don't like Emacs keybindings, Doom is a great place to start and a fine place to stay. After some time, you might be inspired to make your own Emacs config, or you might just stick with configuring it within the Doom framework.

If your motivation is about keybindings, just use evil-mode and be done with it

If you’re just looking for a good editor, than I would definitely recommend trying doom first. There is a lot of good quality of life stuff in there I like a lot.

Thing is, I noticed that there seems to be a mix of Vim keystrokes and traditional keystrokes. Like I saw `M-x` is still in there and `:help` didn't work IIRC. So I don't know which functionality is accessed which way.

\+1 on this. While the "Emacs from Scratch" isn't the "easy out of the box" answer - its still IMO probably the fastest way to get to the point where you actually start to see the \*benefits\* of using Emacs over e.g. VS-code. While I'd say Spacemacs is probably the easiest to get started with - you really don't get into the things that make emacs more productive than e.g. VS-code until you kinda start to see how completely open/hackable Emacs is from the inside-out. TBH i've never liked the default Emacs keybindings - or really much of anything that Emacs gives you by default. It's really the "bones of it" that are different from the other editors.

In my experience both methods usually work. I know :help works for me

OK, gotta try it out again.

100% yes that is a great way to start. That's what I did, Doom is a remarkable achievement, and a great place to start. Welcome!

You can turn off all the vim stuff in doom emacs and just use a well supported pre configured setup for whatever languages you're writing in. Some people don't want to spend all day tweaking a configuration file, and that is fine.

Doom is great if you want to hit the ground running. I find its shortcuts more mnemonic than plain emacs. For getting started, I recommend the videos by Zaiste Programming on YouTube. He repeats commands and says them out loud so it’s easier to follow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCMh7srOqvw&list=PLhXZp00uXBk4np17N39WvB80zgxlZfVwj If you want to endlessly fiddle (which is fine) and are more advanced, then System Crafters might be better. I will point out that his configurations have been through at least three iterations now - From Scratch / literate, Rational Emacs, and now Crafted Emacs I think is the latest. Not sure why he abandoned literate configurations, as those are self documenting. Now it seems he’s building a modular Emacs configuration for people who want their own configuration that isn’t modular (like doom), which seems ironic. There are others too, such as Distro Tube.

If you are afraid you'll get lost in Doom Emacs, as u/aqjo has already mentioned, start watching Doom Casts from Zaiste Programming on YouTube.

It's meant to be a scaffolding (and a learning resource) for building one's own vanilla config over time with a decent starting point. Someone may decide to just keep using Crafted as their config and that's fine too. Regarding literate configurations, I just got tired of the tangling and preferred to go back to writing pure Emacs Lisp. I'm also moving more toward using Guix Home for my dotfiles as a whole and didn't want an extra tangling layer there too. Literate configs are great though, especially since you can generate a nice website out of them!

Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation!

why either-or ? pick both doom + config\_from\_scratch approaches! Install chemacs to help you out! I have a stable doom config that's production ready and my daily driver. I also have other emacs configs that I tinker with.