There are a lot of great Emacs configurations out there. You’ve got Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Aquamacs for Mac users, and so forth. But if you’re just starting out, you might be wondering: should I use these pre-built configurations, or should I go for vanilla Emacs?
Cool Factor
If you’re checking out Emacs YouTubers, like yours truly, you might be impatient to start with a vanilla GNU Emacs canvas and build your configuration from scratch.
There’s an instant cool factor you get with a package like Doom, for example, that would be difficult and time-consuming to build on your own.
However, I’d say you should start vanilla.
Starting In The Vanilla
When I started with Emacs, I started with plain vanilla GNU Emacs. I opened the tutorial and learned the basics of moving around.
I knew I wanted to use Org mode. That was all I was interested in. I didn’t care about having a fancy configuration to start. I knew I could tweak and customize along the way.
I tried out Doom and Spacemacs, and they are highly functional. But they don’t furnish you with a good foundation. There’s a lot of sophisticated software in these configurations. You may never need this much. But how would you know?
Emacs ships with a lot of built-in functionality already. I think it’s important to start with a solid foundation in the built-in functions before moving on to more advanced configurations.
Keeping It Minimal
Any package you install will build upon—or, sometimes overwrite—existing functionality. This is fine. But if you don’t know what’s under the hood then you may get flummoxed when something breaks. And you’ll have to dig into endless forum posts to find a solution. (Though, now, you can go pretty far by querying a language model.)
If you start with plain Emacs, you can keep track of your installations as they accumulate over time. With a neat, modular configuration file, you can more easily troubleshoot when something goes wrong (and something inevitably will).
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