Why do people use standard/default GNU/Emacs when more modern versions such as Doom Emacs exist?

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Sorry, but this is a ridiculous question. Versions like Doom just preconfigure a bunch of features. And Evil is only a good thing if you like vi-style, mode-based editing - which many of us despise. Also, many of us have been using emacs for a long time (33 years for me) and are just fine with regular.

Doom Emacs is Emacs, configured in a way to be “user-friendly”. Most of the content you find around for vanilla emacs will apply to Doom Emacs, just not always leveraging the modal editing mode provided by evil mode. If you learn the concepts behind of projectile and magit, for instance, it will serve you well on Doom.

Anything that works for the default Emacs, also works with DOOM Emacs (except for default keybindings). But the other way around isn't true. (Ok, the other way around can be true, but then you have to tweak a bunch of other things and download some packages)

Tutorials for configuring vanilla Emacs can be used to configure Doom Emacs. Doom is, at it's core, vanilla Emacs with some parts preconfigured. There may be a few parts of Doom that may require Doom-specific documentation, but I'd be surprised if there were many. Targeting tutorials to generic Emacs allows them to be found by anyone who they can help, regardless of if they're using Doom, Spacemacs, vanilla Emacs, or some other variant. It's a feature, not a bug.

You have the wrong impression of what Doom Emacs is I'm afraid. You use the word "version", but Doom Emacs isn't a different version of Emacs, it's just a config for Emacs.

Because it's very opinionated, and I don't like its opinions.

Doom is a layer on top of GNU Emacs. It's got some optimizations, sure, but anybody who puts the time and effort into it can hand-craft a configuration that has all of the Doom features they want, and doesn't waste space or time on the features they don't want. So theoretically, all those tips and code snippets on the internet for "GNU" Emacs should work for Doom as well. In fact, a lot of them are already included with the default Doom Emacs config, mostly in the "modules" folder (I think. The code is ofc at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs and on your computer). Where Doom has an advantage is that it includes and enables a lot of features/packages by default, and optimizes the heck out of them. One youtube channel based around Doom Emacs is "Distrotube" (he also does general Linux content and I find his voice annoying, but choose your battles). A disadvantage of Doom Emacs is that it includes a lot of things that many of us are neutral or negative on. For example, the themes. Many people love low-contrast dark themes, but I personally can't stand them, so I have my own theme that I have to figure out how to apply when setting up Doom. As another commenter mentioned, Evil is a turn-off for many people. Essentially, **If you're going to turn it off anyway, why have it?** The other disadvantage of Doom is that it's not as obvious where to copy-paste code that you want. The Doom init.el is a single configuration statement, packages.el is just a list of package names to install, config.el explains a lot but wants you to put things in `(after! )` blocks, and everything else is hidden. By lazy-loading (which is how Doom gets its fast startup), they've obscured the order in which features are loaded, so it's easy to have something not work or get canceled out later for seemingly no reason. > if anyone has any good resources on how to configure doom extensively Doom _is_ configured extensively. To its credit, it does a great deal better than Spacemacs (and many personal configs) at squeezing performance out of all its moving parts. But that still just makes it 'the lightest heavy configuration'. You can take it, or you can leave it. The choice is up to you. I chose to leave it, followed along with the series "Emacs from Scratch" from System Crafters on YouTube. He walks through setting up evil and themes, then starts getting into how to optimize loading times with things like `use-package` (which doom also uses under the hood). It's a time investment and you will learn basic lisp along the way, but lisp is fun. Tl;dr: it's a trade-off. Do what works for you, that's the point of Emacs.

Based

I started out with vanilla, building my own config as I needed it and as I became more familiar with emacs, so I don't really have an incentive.

I tried doom for a year and liked it all right. I was wanting to practice vi, and I liked that a lot of languages were well supported. I didn't like the key combos for lisp programming, though. They are in general longer. Also, it's impossible to open a new file "foo" if there's already a file "foobar", thanks to autocomplete. Then there was some package update which broke my doom install and I gave up on it.

to escape the autocomplete u press C-j i think

Eh - still worse than vanilla.

Personally I want to learn emacs inside an out over time so I went with the from scratch series. I also don't use EVIL mode so doom's proclivity for that turns me away as well.

I enjoy tinkering with the config and understanding every extra thing I put into my editor. Doom is awesome, but it's opinionated and I disagree with some of its choices.

Thanks for your extensive reply, I will check out the series you mentioned.

I would use doom if they could get their wayland support sorted out by getting 29 support included.

Doom is literally just fancy dotfiles lol. There is no difference in programs

My emacs is the most modern of all ;)

Been using 29 with doom for over 7 months. Never had issues.

I'm an Emacs noob and Doom confuses the hell out of me, I use vanilla with org in a very basic way.

​ This is unfair to Doom. Have a look at what it does in early-init.el, or doom-start.el. It's really a lot more than a configured Emacs. I do agree with the spirit of this, if the spirit is "It's all Emacs underneath". It's not a more modern version of it.

I have zero interest in any of the early start code which, I believe can be done in vanilla gnu emacs anyway. I start emacs about once per week and just keep using the same session. Maybe using emacsclient also. Why are some people obsessed with startup time and constantly starting new copies of emacs? What is the use case?

I want my configs and my configs only. Doom has a lot of configuration there by default which I have no plan to use

We really need a large-scale poll of gnu emacs users - especially doom and other configs since I’d bet a very large percentage of them are vi/vim/gvim users who really just want access to org mode!

Those *are* config files though. I agree it’s a very advanced level of configuration, but a configuration all the same. Maybe there is/should be better terminology for something between configuration and a fork. But at that point it’s really just semantics. I do think it is often said to undercut the work that has gone into Doom though.

how doom could get the wayland support? It's nothing but a bunch of config files.

Doom has some great optimisations but I find understanding my emacs config allowed to realise the advantages of emacs. I still use doom as a reference for configuring new packages, but without having any understanding of emacs beyond doom seems pointless to me, as other editors are far more suited to that sort of hands off configuration style.

Doom Emacs is just emacs with a fancy config that you may or may not like. Evil-mode is part of core for example, nothing to do with Doom except Doom defaults to it.. Its all like that. All the packages that make Doom .. Doom, are available to straight up Emacs. So do you want the kitchen sink corvette and chip away at it, or start with the reliable frugal base model and add to it? Up to you. Ask people why they like Debian or Arch or Gentoo..

I like to configure everything by myself

> I believe can be done in vanilla gnu emacs anyway I don't know what you mean by this. All of Doom is done in vanilla Emacs. "Configuring a bunch of features" seems to mean "choose font and set defaults for packages". Doom does a lot more than that. > What is the use case? Assuming that this is in good faith, which seems charitable: - recovering from crashes - specially when testing your new mode/package/lib and it has a fatal bug - opening a new instance while your current one has its thread locked up by something because Emacs is not multi-threaded, and probably will never be - opening Emacs in a managed work laptop that has forced restarts because of company policy - using different configurations

And Magit. I don't see a problem with this reason to use Emacs.

I once read someone here saying "Please, do not call Doom a distro, it's just someone's config." That is not fair at all. So agree on undercutting the work.

This is something that I never understand about vim users. It feels like that they're only editing existing code, and never write new code. I find myself in insertion mode most of the time whenever I use vim, so to me, it's still like emacs, or any other editors.

DOOM and similar projects are not more modern versions Emacs, it’s GNU Emacs with someone else’s configuration. I have my configuration.

Doom Emacs is also organized around Vim-like keybindings which many Emacs users don't like

You are correct in all .. except of you linkung Doom to modal rfiting. Doom privides also non-Evil operation, this is in fact what I use: https://github.com/holgerschurig/emacs-doom-config (kindly notice line 56 of the init.el there) Btw, I see Doom as a fast starting ground. My config.el for Doom is (almost) as long as it was when I used vanilla Emacs.

Well, /u/MitchellMarquez42 is however correct and incorrect. Doom comes with a lot of things that you might not want (correct). But is configurable: what I don't want I don't use or activate. So there he is quite incorrect. He might not know about init.el and about (disable-packages! ...) in packages.el. This gives coarse- and fine-grained control. Regarding the alleged themes problem: that is wrong, too. You don't have to use Doom's themes at all. In fact, it's a FAQ on how to set your own theme. I, for example, am happyly run Modus themes with Doom. Similarly, that Doom forces Evil is just wrong. Mitchell doesn't know about what he writes. Again, I use Doom with Emacs bindings. So I guess Mitchell judges Doom on very incomplete knowledge. That you can use random snippets from the Internet is however mostly true. Doom Emacs **is** Emacs, after all. In my config.el, I have a lot of "snippets" that I accumulated, even from my "before Doom" days. See See also https://github.com/holgerschurig/emacs-doom-config

Cool, I'll have to check it out again. My judgment was based on experience, but I clearly haven't tried to like it enough. I didn't say there was a theme _problem_. I was just using theming as an example of my frustration with the package and loading abstractions. But I missed that in the FAQ, so fair enough.

I trust you are correct that you only start Emacs once in awhile. But please try to impose this behavior onto others. If others don't do that, and enjoy fast startup times, who are you to look down onto them? Other people work differently than you. Don't be the intolerant Elitist telling them that they should bear with inefficiency by starting things only then and now. For example, when I tinker with my Emacs config, I tend to start Emacs several times an hour. Simply to know 8f my Emacs still starts correctly from a known state. I want that to be fast, not slow as molasses. That doesn't mean I won't use emacsclient, one can enjoy the benefits of fast Emacs startup **and** emacsclient!! Don't create a false dichotomy.

Ok. We don’t use git in my group so I didn’t think of that. We use a niche revision control tool that integrates with schematic design tools.

I’m not sure why you think my post was trying to impose my methodology on others. I was just wondering why the startup time was such a big deal and you gave an example of where it can matter. I’m just trying to get data on how people are using emacs. That’s why I asked about having a poll. Obviously, all the new users who are introduced by Doom or Spacemacs are very energized about their setups. I just have no idea how big this recent wave of users is compared to those of us who’ve been using it for literally decades.

Doom is great but adds another layer of configuration. This extra layer of complexity can be both helpful : enabling some group of doom's features is easier than in vanilla. But when you want to tweak something your own way it gets harder : should this feature be tweaked the doom's way ? Or the emacs way ? Maybe doom has some features which rely on that how can I tell? In vanilla since not much is enabled by default it's easier to understand what's going on. In doom, most things are better out of the box but when you need to go deeper things are not obvious since much is already handled by doom's config layer

What isn't configuration? Do you have to write C for it to not be considered configuration? The false dichotomy being drawn seem very not Lisp-like.

I've gone a pretty circuitous route. Doom w/evil -> Own config with Emacs bindings -> Doom with Emacs bindings -> Doom w/evil. I enjoyed rolling my own config for a year or two. I enjoyed learning the Emacs bindings. I think emacs is more consistent with its vanilla bindings (I still get confused in the terminals with evil), but ultimately I like vi bindings enough in day to day to not abandon them. Rolling your own config is great but I just got kinda tired of it/found Doom good enough for my needs and switched back. Rolling my own config for a few years gave me a bunch better appreciation for how it all works. I'm glad I did it/went with Doom solely for ease of use.

I’m taking you questions to be rhetorical, as I am certainly no arbiter of language surrounding this; but it is interesting to me. I would agree that there would a false dilemma, but there are actually no - to my knowledge - alternative terms being excluded. All we have is configuration. Doom refers to itself as “configuration framework” in its README. Which, perhaps can be used to reflect better accuracy while also not undercutting it’s level of effort. At the very least, a reframing of the term configuration as something not as dismissive would be welcome. Because, as you imply, it can encompass the entirety of Emacs’ extensibility.

Emacs is not a VSCode. It require some maintenance to be efficient. It's hard to discover all possibilities unless you configure it by yourself!

Exactly. NeoVim user, can confirm.

GTK likes to kill Emacs on Wayland. https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=56967

It's not doom that isn't compatible; it is the plugin choice.

Really! I might try it again then. Are you using server&client?