Doom is just as bloated and a pain to config.
Yes.
Spacemacs is awesome. It was what allowed me to switch 100% to using Emacs.
The amount of time necessary to devote to being proficient in Emacs is significant. When you have to figure out how to re-wire Emacs and all the various extensions you want to use to use Evil (with consistent bindings) is even more.
Spacemacs allowed me to benefit from the work that others have done in these regards significantly.
However I recently switch over to Doom-Emacs. Which is very much like Spacemacs, but faster and easier to customize.
I strongly recommend that people trying out Emacs that do NOT want to give up Vi/Vim/NeoVim bindings to check out Doom-Emacs. It is the shit. It is very very good. Not nearly as quick as NeoVim, but it's worlds better then it used to be. And pretty attractive as far as text-oriented applications go.
Native Comp + Doom-Emacs + Native Wayland GTK + Nerd Fonts = Best damn operating system ever invented. So far. And it comes with a really good editor, too.
evil-collection actually makes this quite easy now. So if you want to roll your own Emacs config from scratch with vim keybindings, it's about as easy doing it with Emacs keybindings. It wasn't a thing when Spacemacs or Doom got started, though.
I have been spending a lot of time with Dawes Wilsons ‘SystemCrafters’ YT live sessions and other vlogs - that’s an awesome source for emacs (and more) knowledge, highly recommended!!!)
So now I’m finally crawling in emacs (org for note-taking and being the main driver, and magit soon to come…)
Exactly right. It's assumed that you have emacs installed separately. From the spacemacs repo...
> Spacemacs is an extension of a popular text editor called Emacs. Thus you need to first install base Emacs and then download the Spacemacs extension files with Git.
Give it another try! You might like it.
I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org) as a very good alternative for vim users that want to learn Emacs. I'm very satisfied with it, although it is slow to start, but I'm going to try Emacs server/client that I just heard about in this discussion.
Have anybody tried Spacemacs?