Doom Emacs

I've tried many different editors in my time as a programmer. At first it was Notepad++, while I was still using Windows. Eventually I moved to linux, and used GEdit and Nano.

Atom, an electron based editor with plugins was next. All the plugins you could install were awesome. However, I quickly began to chafe at the idea of using electron. It was slow and memory-intensive. Why did a text editor need an entire web browser to run?

After seeing one of my college professors using vim, I decide to give it a try too. It took me a bit, but I eventually learned the basics of editing with vim. And it made such a difference! I could move much faster around files, even with the little I knew. Vim also had many plugins, so I could still get my syntax highlighting and code completion.

But I never did like running it in a terminal. It was great for when I wanted to edit files on a remote server through SSH, but it didn't look nice all the other times. Nevertheless, I carried on using vim.

At some point, I heard of spacemacs, which was based on emacs but had vim style keybindings. Intrigued I checked it out and was blown away by how nice it looked. Unfortunately, I found configuring it to be annoying, and eventually returned to vim.

And that brings us to the end of the story. I finally found Doom Emacs. Like spacemacs, it was based on emacs. It had vim style keybindings. Unlike spacemacs, I don't mind configuring it. It also started up much faster than spacemacs. I've begun to learn about some of the ridiculously powerful plugins available for emacs. This blog post was even written in emacs, with the org-mode package. In short, I think I'm doomed to stay with Doom Emacs!