GitHub - hlissner/doom-emacs: An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker.
An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker - GitHub - hlissner/doom-emacs: An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker
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Funny, I just set up Doom this weekend, esp in order to use the amazingly excellent and phenomenally lovable OrgMode. Doom certainly makes things simple to get going, and the performance is great.
A solid Emacs setup, great vim bindings, pretty much without the Emacs rabbit hole.
Would you recommend it to a newcomer?
I would, it gives a much nicer starter experience of using Emacs than vanilla does. If you later decide to roll your own config you can always do so and will have a better understanding of where you can take it.
Especially if you want to use Vim bindings which is a bit of a pain to setup nicely for all various third party packages if you start with vanilla Emacs. They have also spent a lot of time optimizing how packages are loaded in order to get the startup much more performant.
It looks pretty good - if they’ve worked on performance I think I might give it a go as well (I found Spacemacs a little slow). Bookmarked a reminder for next month 
I’ve installed Spacemacs at first. But using Vim bindings with Emacs seems a bit cursed lol.
But tbh I’m so used to Vim bindings that I can not simply drop them.
I’d like to try Emacs for elixir-mode and orgmode. Even though I don’t know what org-mode is 
Its been so long since I used Spacemacs I’ve forgotten as well 
Wonder if anyone else knows?
Btw here’s how I installed DoomEmacs on Mac.
Haha, OK you asked for it. Org Mode is… well it starts way back when you were just a twinkle in your father’s excited eye and a Swiss scientist wanted a better way to organize his already very organized, very Swiss life. Oh but wait… I’m seeing that the first release was in 2003, and that the scientist was Dutch. Hmm. And of course I don’t know anything at all about your father so please forgive my deranged sense of humor… “I blame the pandemic.”
So anyway, Org Mode is using .txt files and adding a layer of parseable conventions, and then calling it a .org file. So that’s similar to a .md file. But .org is about bullet points that you can show and hide, links to other .org files, and tags for things like todo lists that then are all gathered into a central Agenda, and so on and so on. Because you have emacs behind it, there’s almost no end to what you can do, and there are guacazillion Org Mode packages that you can install. You can publish from Org Mode straight to Hugo or another static site generator. You can run a D&D game. You can run a business. You can control a database (whether or not you should). You can publish your thesis, make a zettelkasten linked-notes thingy with Org-Roam (which is great, and similar to Roam-Research, Obsidian, etc.), a personal wiki, literate programming, and so on and so on forever.
I’m using it now for notes, todos, agenda, time management. It’s good for me to have my agenda connected to my notes so that they can be blended together. I was one of those kids whose room is always messy, and for whom cleaning up feels like pushing pins into their arms, not least because they’re just hopeless at it unless they focus on just that, but they have lots of other things to focus on, not cleaning the damn room. That’s to say, I was born to have personal assistants and a cleaning staff.
Zeus, however, thought otherwise. He hurled a lightning bolt that killed off my personal assistants so that I wouldn’t have any until I finally and truly learned how to clean my room. Now, Pallas Athena, seeing my plight and taking mercy on me, gave me a gift, a tool to help me through my travails: of course it was Org Mode.
“But beware,” said grey-eyed goddess, “Org Mode takes endless pleasure in reorganizing itself according to your slightest whim as well as your best-laid plan; it’s up to you to keep you goal and vision clear.”
So I try to keep things sane, simple, and even still it’s way more flexible than anything else I’ve tried.
I can be writing/outlining an idea in one file, mark something as a [TODO] or an [IDEA], etc. etc., and Org Mode will grab those and show them to me in a consolidated view, all from text files. I can then add these items to my agenda, saying for example that I’d like to do such and such next Tuesday. If I don’t do them on Tuesday they show up on Wednesday. These little things can be well connected to the most fundamental document that describes the soul of my endeavor. So this is just notes-y stuff but everything is integrated and together, and along with the rest of Emacs, your file system, great windows/buffer etc. management, accessible from terminal, and at the same time at the level of a single file, quite simple. Oh and future-proof. You can also pull live data into your file, track numbers, create tables very easily, do spreadsheet-y things, and you have Emacs and elisp behind it so that really, there’s not much of a limit. Double-entry accounting with ledger-mode, which is emacs but then you can pump that into your org files.
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-ledger.html
Here’s a fun one that illustrates some capabilities:
A bad point is poor mobile support, though not entirely wretched. iOS apps include Plain Org and BeOrg.
Also it’s surely not for everyone. I’ve allowed myself to take liberties with this post as a kind of litmus test: If you can’t stand the diversions, unnecessary rambling and half-unhinged, eccentric style I’ve indulged in here, then it might be a hint that Org Mode and maybe Emacs isn’t for you. It’s eccentric, demands you follow its metaphors/way of thinking, has roads that lead to dead ends. It’s also extremely human, authentic, capable, flexible, will outlast everything except Vim, and if you gel with it, can fit itself to your way of thinking and being that’s powerful, creativity-enhancing, and maybe even… ennobling?
Yeah yeah… it’s basically text files.
Haha I was, but because I was 13… Still a twinkle 
And so do I
That’s what I call a rollercoaster. You got me, Gonna try this as soon as possible 
Thanks for the read, it was very interesting!
It’s just the beginning of my journey through Emacs.
I want to see a version of that post as a screencast Mallory! I am sure it would be even more entertaining
Loved the journey through your thoughts 
.
My attempt at a recap:
“It’s a lifestyle”
If you have used Roam research or logseq they borrow heavily from Org-mode and improve in the interlinking between nodes and pages. Which in turn are brought back to Org-mode through org-roam.
Like @malloryerik I use Org-mode for a lot of thing. At work it’s basically where I spend the most time and use it for notes and todo system (similar to how you would use a very powerful wiki which is built on org-roam).
For permanent notes (that I intend to keep for a life time and transcending work places) I use Zetteldeft which adds a layer of linking on top of Org that is agnostic to software.
In combination with also coding in Emacs you get a really powerful suite, provided you make it through the early phases.
That said, all of these things can be replicated in other environments. The true power of emacs is that you can override/change or extend anything through code. In your configuration or on the fly by just evaluating code.
I really laughed out loud. This is so well put.
Spacemacs was so slow for me that at the lowest point of my physical health 2-3 months ago I still mustered the time and energy to (likely temporarily) move to CentaurEmacs. It’s quite OK but it has a few rough edges that I don’t like but… my patience for fiddling with Emacs is almost entirely depleted. The very last one I’ll try is Doom indeed and after that I’ll be moving forever to NeoVim, likely with LunarVim on top.
I felt the same about Spacemacs hence stopped using it.
Sorry to hear your health hasn’t been great - I wondered where you got to! Hope you’re feeling better now? You might be interested in some recent threads David Sinclair’s new Lifespan podcast and Andrew Huberman Podcasts
I’ll be looking forward to seeing Bart’s wiki on the Elixir Forum: Doom Emacs - Elixir Wiki - Wikis - Elixir Programming Language Forum
Why not MacVim?
That’s what I use. I’m quite happy with it. I do not want to pass hours configuring stuff.
But I really can’t stand VSCode…
I’ve tried to build OniVim from source but got issues with both local and Docker build.
And emacs is kind of a new world so…
Gotta go back to punch card I guess.
I’m going to run with Doom Emacs for a few weeks to see what I think (switching from LunarVim). I figure I need a few weeks to get past the “why don’t you work like vim” issue in my head so I can give Doom Emacs a fair judgement.
I used Spacemacs forever ago but always switched back to vim. Orgmode is a mixed thing for me…if I start using it then I must forever commit to Emacs.
