this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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My answer for op is use Doom, I personally think it's more polished and the best end user experience with someone not so experienced.
And now, a rant for why I completely disagree with people here who just recommend Vanilla. Starter kits are there for a reason. It is painfully hard for a new user to start out on GNU Emacs and get everything they want running and if they are not patient, they will outright quit.
I tried it and quit in less than a month. Then I tried Spacemacs and I loved it. I used it for a few months and then I wanted to customize things my way more and used vanilla, which is what I've used for the past 3 years. Right now, I wouldn't use a starter kit even if I was paid to do so, because my vanilla config has too much stuff I like and the premades have a lot I don't like. But I would never have become a power user if I didn't start from a starter kit. Just because you guys use it (and you do well to do so) doesn't mean it's beginner friendly. In my opinion, it's one of the most beginner hostile pieces of software out there. And I love it and wish they never change that, because being the blank canvas it is, it allows you to make virtually anything in it. But that's once you learn the basics and it doesn't slow you down just to use.
I don't know man; I started some 20+ years ago with vanilla and for the first like almost 20 years I had no more than perhaps 20 - 30 lines of elisp in my .emacs file.
I used it so until some ~3 - 4 years ago when I got more interested in Emacs and started to learn Elisp and tinker around with it.
I have had pretty much the same path as you, and playing around with Emacs lisp is super fun.
+1 as someone who went from maintaining my own emacs config to just using doom. I'm really happy with it
+1 I switched back and forth between doom and spacemacs for a while. At the end, I stayed with doom for its simplicity and nice defaults. The development restarted after a long pause, and nice things are planned for the future.
I used vanilla emacs for 7 years before trying out both spacemacs and doom for a few weeks. But moved back to vanilla with my own config since I learned little elisp by this point. I would suggest emacs starter kits that don't deviate too far from vanilla.
If OP is looking for an editor with nice defaults and nice customization then I'd agree, use Doom Emacs.
If you have very specific preferences, or simply play around and have fun a bit with editors and tooling, then going with vanilla is the best option.
I agree a lot with this!