Rewriting My Emacs Config

Published: 2020-11-06

Since the last post, I had switched over to Doom Emacs for a while and then, hopefully, have switched back to my hand-crafted emacs config for the last time. I wanted to try Doom for some reasons:

I didn’t like the startup time of my previous handcrafted emacs config,
I found painful to look at my emacs config, and
I wanted to learn more from this very successful community-driven project.

Even prior to switching over to Doom, I took a lot of inspirations from it to enhance my config. One main frustration of using Spacemacs was its think layers of abstracts. I didn’t find such frustration with Doom. Doom is very well documented and stays true to its mantras:

Close to metal. There’s less between you and vanilla Emacs by design. That’s less to grok and less to work around when you tinker. Internals ought to be written as if reading them were part of Doom’s UX, and it is!

Trying various modules, it’s fun exploring various pre-configured packages without the hustle to configure them pre-maturely. As an example, I like the org module just work out of the box with various of plugins.

However, eventually I grew tired of looking at all the keybindings that I wasn’t using. All the keybindings and functionalities that I wasn’t using, or didn’t spark joy in me, made me sad. For every single unused keybinding, it is an extra mental burden in my workflow. If I get rid of all the unnecessary keybindings I could improve the efficiencies on the ones I use most often, because I no longer need the long nested key strokes anymore.

Also, I found the System Crafters YouTube serious Emacs From Scratch. It really was a godsend to me to help me start writing my Emacs config again. My current Emacs Config drew a lot of inspirations from it and from the author’s, David Wilson’s, own config.

So far, I really like that I have total control over my emacs configuration, and the start time wasn’t too terrible either.

Links: - Doom Emacs - Emacs From Scratch - My current Emacs Config - My current Emacs theme