Zaiste Programming
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2020
7:03 · 159K views · Sep 26, 2018
A short first episode in Zaiste's Doom Emacs series, showing how to get started with Doom, an Emacs configuration aimed at Vim users. It presents Doom as a polished, fast, batteries-included distribution.
HN users recommend the series to newcomers learning Emacs, Doom, org-mode, projectile and magit.
4 comments from Hacker News
I have started using emacs in 2016 because of org-mode. It was powerful enough to make me use emacs on a daily basis since them. However, I have been using RStudio/Sublime as IDE/editor, not emacs. Curiously last weekend I have found a video about org-roam and the presenter mentioned he was using Doom emacs. I was curious enough to try it. It uses vim key bindings by default. To get started I highly recommend this series by Zaiste [0], he explains how to set up the environment and digs into org-mode which were my main concerns. I found the sections on projectile, magit, dired and avy very helpful. Now I am tempted to give it a try in one of my projects. The downfall so far is I didnt find an in depth explanation on how to grok it with python. [0] this video
I think there's a lot to learn from starting from scratch, and it's something I hope to do too. Gladly! I'll keep the list to what I've studied so far. Here goes: - If you ever want to explore, say, Doom (Spacemacs is likely too bloated for someone who gravitates to a vanilla config), chemacs[1] is a nifty, simple profile switcher - I think there's a lot of value in studying what they've done with their mnemonic keybinding systems (I love being able to narrow to an org-mode subtree and widen again with =, n= and =, N=, respectively, as but one of many examples) - Sasha Chua is a good source, as she's very knowledgeable and put out a drawn 1-pager[2] on starting Emacs - it's geared towards standard Emacs keybindings - Personally, I'm a huge fan of Evil-mode for Vim keybindings, as they're powerful and portable and I had basic familiarity with Vim before picking up Emacs - I haven't found a rough edge in Evil-mode yet - it seems very refined - Dired is worth getting a handle on early since any improvement in how you can navigate Emacs translates - Magit is pure magic, and I now have my full ~/org under version control with what feels like near-0 overhead - Seorenn makes mostly Spacemacs videos[3] and Zaiste Programming makes Doom videos[4], but I find them useful regardless of my config - you may just want to skip to the videos on packages that interest you - If you haven't yet, choosing either Helm or Ivy is huge - Personally, I'm happy with helm in Spacemacs and I was happy w
There is also Doom Emacs [1] which provides Vim experience out-of-the-box. It also comes with a fantastic theme. I've been using Vi/Vim for more than two decades now. Doom made me feel at home. I used to envy Emacs all these nice features such as Org Mode, Magit and even the ability to use Lisp to configure your environment. Now it's the best of both worlds. I just wish Emacs' onboarding process / cohesiveness was as good as in VS Code. It would be a dream come true. ;) PS. I've recorded a short Doom screencast for newcomers [2] [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video
I've recently blown away my several years old custom Emacs config and started over with vanilla Doom Emacs (it's supposedly a faster version of Spacemacs, but I don't really know, I just took a stab and grabbed one of them). I spent a weekend doing some VIM tutorials and writing down common key strokes of things I do all the time, and then on a Monday, it was all VIM navigation. A lot of your regular Emacs meta-stuff will still work, and for that, you can slowly start replacing with the spacebar-b key stroke for your buffer management, spacebar-p for projectile, etc.... Here's a couple of the videos I watched: 1) [LINK] 2) I've only watched a couple of these for the topics I'm interested: this video 3) for common VIM, I went with this: [LINK] 4) Recently, I found this guys short six-part series that gets you navigating around VIM fast, but he's an acquired taste: [LINK] There's still some things I like better about Emacs navigation and there's a lot I like about VIM navigation. I prefer Emacs crtl-a and ctrl-e for navigating to front and end of the line (instead of $ and ^, which is an awkward shift+number key on my keyboard). However, in Doom Emacs (likely Spacemacs too since I believe they both support Evil-mod) if you're in Insert Mode, most of your old Emacs navigation will still work, so this makes it a decent crutch for transitioning.