The built in tutorial followed by a couple of weeks of forcing yourself to use it for basic editing tasks until you find yourself comfortable again. Don’t try to recreate a full IDE experience at first. Try to walk before you run. The beauty of emacs comes from discovering that it solves problems you didn’t know you had rather than being a drop in for your current IDE.

Thanks, great advice, I would say it was my mistake before, I wanted to configure everything how I wanted and the information was overwhelming, plus the learning curve.

While tempting, don’t do that. Use it as-is for a little bit to see its way of doing things before you start tweaking.

My init.el adds quite a bit of functionality but doesn’t change many default settings at all.

Emacs 29 made getting started a lot easier IMO, my from-scratch configuration is pretty minimal and I use it everyday. To plug my own project, I built a "kickstart" equivalent (https://github.com/mgmarlow/start-emacs) that sets up some recommended defaults and packages with lots of comments so you can easily extend it.

Go through emacs from scratch:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw

Try using that config 25% of your work/productive time for 1 month.

Then if you are annoyed by how much time it takes try using doomemacs for the same 25% time.

At the end of this you'll know if/which emacs approach is for you.

Thanks for the recommendation

And look at all the many other excellent videos that David Wilson (aka SystemCrafters) have made regarding Emacs!

No problem.

25% isn't a hard number btw, tailor for the process to be frictionless and useful for you.

Many configuration-ish things that were hard a few years ago are now way easier. with emacs 29+. There's way fewer reason to reach for doomemacs etc now because package management, configuring LSP mode, etc is much cleaner these days.

In some ways working through setting up your .emacs the way you want it is a great way to learn the tool.

Agreed. It's gotten easier. If I was starting Emacs from scratch again, I'd probably write my own vanilla config. But Doom helped introduce me when the concept was bizarre and foreign to me, and I'm very grateful for that. Now I'm comfortable with my Doom config, and it works great, so I have little incentive to ditch it.

The problem I have with doom and spacemacs is that it seems to be bringing people into the emacs community using the vi keybindings as default, including people who were not vim users before... which is... strange.

Vanilla Emacs keybindings, or cua-mode, are fine, and probably less of a learning curve than going modal. If you're already in that headspace, all power to you, but half the reason I got into emacs in the first place was because I couldn't stand vi.

either:

1. go through the entire built-in tutorial (which it will prompt you about on first load)

2. just adopt doomemacs or spacemacs, which are very large complicated default configs that are easier for vim users to start with

moving the control and alt keys while keeping the default keybindings makes for a great experience imo

https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods