This document will be a living document that i’ll attempt to update from time to time

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Pico and Nano
• Vim
• doom emacs
• emacs28 with native compilation
• Markdown mode
• Org mode and babel

Intro

I’ve been using doom-emacs for over a year now (since March 2021) and this is my personal experiences with it.

I do not put a ton of effort into editors, rather I spend a chunk of time intermittently. This has happened with vi/vim and again
with emacs. my vim configuration was always flaky and never worked correctly until around neovim. At that point I was so fed up
with reproducible editor configuration that I looked for something better.

Here is my editor timeline

Pico and Nano

As a systems administration and a PHP developer, I primarily built CMS type stacks and shopping cart applications. These
editors worked well but I found myself wasting so much time navigating with page up and page down

Vim

When I discovered vim and what it could do, I became interested.. But…

It was really difficult for me to pick up. Once I managed to make the switch to a modal editor, I never
looked back.

vim configuration was always mystical to me (and still is). I could barely customize it outside of it’s
stock configuration so that’s what I used.

doom emacs

Being a vim user for so many years has basically burned those keys into my brain.

I am still a vim user to this day like using j and k to navigate is still present in doom emacs due to evil mode

I’m by no means a lisp expert but doom emacs is ready to go out very quickly. Some things that look time are learning
and discovering everything that is out there.

Favorite packages

Honerable mentions

• restclient.el
• code folding
• yasnippet for code snippets
• eshell
• markdown mode
• org mode and babel
• dired

emacs28 with native compilation

The editor install is a beast which is not ideal but native compilation made emacs so much faster that I can’t live without it

Markdown mode

Emacs never fails to amaze in the commands it has. One case is in markdown mode, you can simply run markdown-toc-generate-toc and it will generate
a index at the top of the page. This also works for org mode using toc-org-insert-toc

Org mode and babel

I use .org files for keeping notes about various things. Being able to have a text only interface with the ability to link between org files and sections
is really all I need.

Then comes babel, which is a way for emacs to execute source code snippets. For instance for bash, I can get the output of df -h / rendered directly in
my org file

#+begin_src bash :results output
df -h /
#+end_src

#+RESULTS:
: Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
: /dev/nvme0n1p2  1.8T  473G  1.3T  28% /

I’ve used this for a lot of things where you want to remember the command and also capture the results.