+++
title = "Doomed Emacs"
author = ["Colin"]
date = 2018-10-31T09:27:00-04:00
lastmod = 2019-05-29T12:46:00-04:00
tags = ["tools", "doom-emacs"]
categories = ["emacs"]
draft = false
+++

After a year or so of dedicating myself to getting Spacemacs setup just right, I
made a pretty substanial jump a few weeks ago. I'm now running [doom-emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs) which
provides fewer nice surprises (missing evil-surround shortcuts by default) than
spacemacs, but loads much ... much faster. The other day I found myself coding
while sharing my screen on Zoom and is was painfully obvious what price I was
paying for spacemacs not cleaning up after itself and generally lazy loading
things leading to less than fast context switching.

I was willing to struggle through some the slower operations for my own sake,
but getting caught with other people watching as my editor on a brand new
computer struggled to do basic things like searching for symbols in the codebase
was embarrassing.

I'm not done with Spacemacs. I still love the idea, and I also believe that half
the problem was likely the way I was using it and configuring it. But part of
the appeal of spacemacs are the defaults. And it was the defaults that was
making it hard to use it on a daily basis.

Another nice aspect of Doom Emacs is that aside from a handful of evil-mode
shortcuts, a lot of what you're encouraged to use are stock emacs keystrokes.
That means that I'm not learning some cryptic layer on org mode when I use
emacs, I using the default keystrokes that I will find in vanilla emacs. That's
very useful and will hopefully make me a more respectable member of the emacs
community, rather than a vim outcast.
