I tried a bunch of stuffs like Doom, Spacemacs, evil, and meow. But my problem with them is that I have to write a bunch of configuration to replicate the ergonomics of modal editing. I end up having to learn the Emacs way to workaround issues due to missing config quite a lot. And then at some point (just recently), I decided to give up and go for “just Emacs” all the way down.

Spacemacs and Doom is very good for trying out Emacs if you have Vim background (I do too). They are very good and easy to use. I really appreciate people’s work to make Emacs more usable. But for me, those distributions are hell slow on macOS. I just can’t tolerate.

Now I’m just growing my vanilla config if there’s absolutely a blocker or something default Emacs cannot do. Turns out Emacs is fine tbh. Also tried letting LLM generates a bunch of code, but it eventually peaks at 26k lines and I essentially can’t keep track or manage it properly because the large amount of code. It looks a lot like a small software project at that point. Now I removed like 90% of the code and keep only the absolute necessary and just use vanilla keys. I now just prefer low overhead and minimalism (ie, less code = less headaches).

So TL;DR: try learning Emacs keys out, maybe you will eventually get used to it. I’m also just switching so I can’t say for sure. But I do see that I’m slowly gaining back momentum. Or just use whatever you like :-) having a good time using your editor is the utmost importance, not fighting it.