There are probably a decent number of you who have at least heard of Emacs, and among those, most would realize that the most common present day version of Emacs is staunchly called GNU Emacs. Richard M. Stallman is the person who created this version of Emacs. Once upon a time there was a version created at a competing university: Carnegie Mellon University; that version was Gosling Emacs. Anyone besides me even heard of it? Maybe just a few editing historians, right?
Well, this isn’t an article about any debate between Gosling Emacs and GNU Emacs, it’s about a guy who actually was and is an Emacs fan, but never really liked the Emacs key bindings or the capabilities of Emacs, and he also wanted a more efficient implementation of Emacs. So what did he do? He embraced something he had noticed in some of the Emacs Lisp routines that were available, some Elisp routines with the usual puns included - evil-mode!
He worked with it, and having seen someone else’s dormant work, he further improved upon it; this was an earlier effort called Spacemacs, which ALSO dealt with the horrible default Emacs key bindings, and replaced them with a SPACE key leader and one or two letters.
Spacemacs was much easier than the default Emacs key bindings, which use weird hand stretching sequences and an odd mixture of Control key sequences and Escape key sequences. Spacemacs was also EVEN HEAVIER and slower than the default GNU Emacs.
I’ve created my own alternative in the past: I’ve used keyboard function keys and number keypads to generate sequences, but today’s laptops rarely have separate number keypads, so I was looking for a *Emacs that handled this.
One day I noticed that Spacemacs was actually not being further developed, but some people were talking about Doom Emacs, so i took a look, tried it out, liked it, and soon was using it regularly.
I could use the OLD Emacs bindings if i wished, but I could ALSO use vi-style key bindings AND I could also use some optimized Space key bindings, and the best news of all is that it is STILL available, regularly updated, and it turns GNU Emacs into something that doesn’t take a graduate degree to utilize it. Okay, it will still take some time, a LOT of time to get to the hundreds of features that it has, but in the meantime, you can get at a really powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that does anything and everything that Vim, Neovim, or Emacs have done, but it’s easier on your hands and fingers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37H7bD-G7nE&t=12s is a YouTube Video by DistroTube entitled Doom Emacs On Day One (Learn These Things FIRST!)
I recommend it for a newcomer to Doom Emacs.
Instead of ME attempting to describe and show you how to install, configure and run Doom Emacs, start with the YouTube Video above. Derek (DistroTube) has many other videos that go into more detail, should you wish to get into creating topical content, he has a Doom Emacs For Noobs video, Org Mode Basics In Doom Emacs for document editing, formatting, and organizing mode, designed for notes, planning, and outlining within Doom Emacs. This video demonstrates some of the basic functions of Org Mode.
I enjoy his videos and despite my own ability to learn, DistroTube is also entertaining and he is a good online teacher, so if you are interested in exploring Doom Emacs I recommend that you check out this link and visit several of his instructional videos about Doom Emacs:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Doom+Emacs+Tutorials+by+DistroTube
Enjoy the journey; I certainly have done so!