Getting pulled back in
This is probably my fourth serious attempt to get into Emacs.
The earlier rounds went about as well as you’d expect. Building my own Emacs setup from scratch quickly turned into a messy pile of hacks, and while I also tried Spacemacs, I never really got comfortable with how it worked. On top of that, it felt sluggish. Since Doom Emacs has a reputation for being much friendlier to Vi/Vim users, that seemed like the right direction this time.
I wouldn’t call myself a veteran Vimer, but I’ve absolutely been shaped by Vim’s modal editing. I basically just want to navigate the world with HJKL. That was also one of the reasons Obsidian never fully clicked for me on desktop. Its Vim mode is just too bare-bones. C-d doesn’t scroll down half a page — it deletes the entire line instead!
Obsidian on mobile is still usable, though. With the Banyan plugin, it’s convenient for jotting down random thoughts whenever they come up. But for everything beyond that, tinkering with Emacs is a lot more fun.
Installing Doom Emacs
Following the instructions from the official repository, installation was just:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs ~/.config/emacs
~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install
It finished much faster than I expected, and the installer is interactive, which already made it feel a bit more approachable than Spacemacs. ~~The script output even had a faint Cargo-like vibe to it...~~
At the end, it printed a few reminders:
But before you doom yourself, here are some things you should know:
1. Don't forget to run 'doom sync' and restart Emacs after modifying init.el or
packages.el in ~/.config/doom. This is never necessary for config.el.
2. If something goes wrong, run `doom doctor` to diagnose common issues with
your environment, setup, and config.
3. Use 'doom upgrade' to update Doom. Doing it any other way will require
additional steps (see 'doom help upgrade').
4. Access Doom's documentation from within Emacs via 'SPC h d h' or 'C-h d h'
(or 'M-x doom/help').
Have fun!
One useful detail here is the doom command itself. It’s a binary under ~/.emacs.d/bin/, and making it available system-wide with a symlink is convenient if you want to run it from anywhere:
sudo ln -s ~/.emacs.d/bin/doom /usr/bin/doom
A couple of initial tweaks
The first thing I wanted was fullscreen on startup:
(add-hook 'window-setup-hook #'toggle-frame-maximized)
After that, I installed EAF:
git clone --depth=1 -b master https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework.git ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/emacs-application-framework/
cd emacs-application-framework
chmod +x ./install-eaf.py
./install-eaf.py
For now, that’s enough to start using it and see how it feels. I’ll keep adding things only when I actually need them.