Back to Doom Emacs

Published on 2025-04-13

Categories: tech
Tags: Emacs

Short post on me going back to Doom Emacs instead of my from scratch setup.

In the beginning

It all started last year (was it before last year?) where I decided to simplify my overall tech setup, and put more Clojure (Joy) in my tech life.

Some steps to simplify my life:

1. Migrate my personal laptop from Guix back to Nix
2. Rebuild my servers from my half baked docker swarm.
3. Going back to Emacs native bindings

Now is time for a 2nd round of Emacs changes.

My current Emacs usage

In recent time, my use of Emacs is as followed:

• IRC with ERC, to chat with my Geek friends
• Email with Notmuch
• Notes with Denote
• Clojure coding with Cider

My current challenges with this my from scratch setup

Here are some of the challenges I have:

• Taking notes
  • Completion does not always work in my notes
  • I would like to link to sub sections of org mode, which it works, completion does not and I would have to code something for it
• IRC
  • I always have issues connecting with ERC, the support for authinfo kind of work, but on restart, I always have to connect, disconnect, and connect again, and C-g to abort the password prompt.
  • lots of connect/disconnect, which I want to track, but not for people that don’t talk.
  • my custom layout is kind of broken, not aligning properly
• Email
  • While I like the Notmuch approach, I found out I don’t really use labels and the overall setup to delete or move elements in actual folders is complex and only partially working
  • I’m thinking of trying again mu4e, which has a more traditional approach to email, but I don’t have a setup yet
• Clojure
  • I broke my LSP setup and I used LSP to get better completion
  • I’d like to get better Java integration in my IDE since Clojure integrates with Java
• Completion
  • I want to try Corfu, but doing so I broke my completion in couple of places.
  • I tried putting back company, but ended up with an incomplete setup

Why not my from scratch setup?

Some of the key reasons:

• Even though my from scratch setup is nice, I still have some integration issues with completion at point in some scenarios, and sometimes completion stop working and I don’t know why
• I always get it close to right, but not exactly right.
• I’m tired of setting up the basics on Emacs
• My setup is getting slower
• I broke my LSP setup and I’m tired of fixing it
• It was a good learning, but want to move on and do other things
• Simplify my tech life, I realized I prefer to code rather than configure my IDE
• There are more Emacs packages I want to use to simplify my tech life, and I don’t want to duplicate effort if another Emacs distribution has it.

Why Doom?

Doom ticks all the boxes of what I need, what I want to improve on my setup, while keeping my life simple.

Yes it’s not fully under my control, and it’s someone else’s setup, but:

• why should that be different than using a Linux distro, and the fact that it’s someone else’s Linux? No one plan to roll their own Linux (well almost no one :D)
• it’s that or I will stop using Emacs gradually
• It’s core is solid and maintained by many people
• It’s core works the way I need it
• The Doom configuration modules cover 80% of what I use with no to minimal configuration
• Even though it favors vim bindings, It supports Emacs native bindings well
• I can easily extend it, and I already have, with the advantage of potentially contributing to the community
• It’s fast to load
• Issues are fixed by the community which I also can contribute to

What is next

Some of my next Emacs objectives are to improve my note taking, and Email setup.

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