I’d recommend Doom Emacs over Spacemacs for a few reasons: Spacemacs tries to be everything-for-everyone and it is far too dense for someone trying to learn Emacs. Evil-mode is its “killer feature” but that’s available without Spacemacs. Doom Emacs is more like Vanilla Emacs with an obvious lean towards evil-mode. It comes with sensible defaults and loads up so much faster than Spacemacs does.