Doom Emacs

 Usually I devote most of my blog entries to writing about the latest distribution update that I've chosen; though I've changed my distribution setups, my main distribution has remained the same for a while: antiX Full Runit; the most recent version is antiX 23.2 Full Runit.

So what is Doom Emacs?  It's an interesting merger of Vi bindings, easier key bindings influenced by the late (deceased) Spacemacs, such as SPC q q to save and exit Emacs.  Doom Emacs was written by a vi user who wanted more features and to bring some vi users into the fold.

It turned out that there have been various key binding emulations in GNU Emacs for decades, but this is more.  It is a modernization effort and a combined technology effort to merge some vi and Emacs features, and default to the vi key bindings.

How does it work?  Very well.  The specifics are that when you first invoke Emacs, that is, after you've installed Doom Emacs, is that you enter Emacs in edit mode, just as you do in vi.  There are a LOT of "evil" functions built in, clearly geek humor at this stage; these integrate vi and Emacs functions.

Suppose you want to operate as traditional GNU Emacs did for a while?  Easy: press the Ctrl key and hold it, then press the Z key; this is notated as Ctrl-Z.  This will change the mode.  If you were in the default (vi) mode, it will change to classic Emacs mode.  If you want to switch to the other mode, press Ctrl-Z again.

If you experiment with this, you'll see that you can switch between the two styles.

How  do you get started?  Visit https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs 

 Install Git if it's not already installed, then run this command:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs ~/.config/emacs

This will quickly download the Doom Emacs configuration.

Then run this next:

 ~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install

This will install Doom Emacs.

Finally, if it's not there already, add 

 ~/.config/emacs/bin to the end of your shell PATH environment.

I put my PATH definition in my .bashrc file and I can execute it

any time it is not already in place.

For more information read the documentation on the

Doom Emacs pages.