I spent today in my pretty stripped down Emacs config. In the end, setting aside dependencies that got pulled in, I’ve installed:
- LSP
- Vertico
- osx-clipboard
- exec-path-from-shell
- recentf
- company
- orderless
- which-key
- marginalia
- evil
- prescient
- undo-fu
- lmno-blog-capture
There are 269 lines in my tangled config file to make it all work, and it seems to take somewhere around 0.7 seconds to launch from the shell (more like 1.3 seconds as a GUI). I had 387 lines in my Doom config, which is honestly a decent reflection on Doom: You can go totally “kid in a candy store” with that thing and it’s doing a lot to help you suffer less for that impulse.
I am probably not done adding stuff. Most of what’s in that list is stuff I got used to in Doom (in significantly less engineered form than you get there). I was mildly surprised to realize how much I’ve gotten used to evil, but after an hour of blundering around and leaving stray ^, $, x, and p in my documents, I broke down and installed it.
The net result of the whole thing today was one of feeling uncluttered. Like, there are things I never really learned how to do with Doom because there was so much to do, and because I couldn’t understand why it was doing some of what it was doing out of the box. The value of taking a step back and just putting back the things I noticed and liked includes knowing why things are doing what they’re doing, and feeling significantly less like my editor is a mysterious box of perils and wonders. And less like an attentional honeypot.