You are just worrying for no good reason. Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are both very good; being far removed from vanilla emacs is not a problem to be worried about.
You are just worrying for no good reason. Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are both very good; being far removed from vanilla emacs is not a problem to be worried about.
Both of those are modal editor configs. Which... No thanks?
Huh? Emacs is inherently a modal editor - transients, isearch, keychords, M-x - these are all forms of modality. Vim-motions simply organizing that all into nice set of patterns - memorable and very practical. Besides, both Doom and Spacemacs absolutely can be used without Evil layer.
This is a ridiculous collapsing of the sense of what people by "modal editing" into a homogeneous conceptual soup.
The core editing components of non-Evil emacs are direct manipulation, not modal. That there are modal aspects on top of that for doing things which practically/genuinely need a modal switch (command entry, search entry, etc) doesn't make the default emacs configuration a "modal editor" in any sense of which people actually apply those terms.
By your definition of modal, almost every application can be described this way. The point is not whether a system has modes, it's whether it makes its core emphasis and interaction modal.
You can see vi's motions as elegant and purposeful. I see them as an accident of history stemming from the poverty of the number of keys and capabilities of the dumb terminal it was designed on.
I encountered both editors in the late 80s and chose emacs precisely because it didn't have the "barely a step up from a teletype" interaction model that vi had.
As for Doom and Spacemacs without Evil.. yes... but why? Their original and state purpose was a packaging with a modal default. It's trivial to toss together your own init.el that brings in the same set of packages these days and with very little effort.
If the goal is an easy packaging of emacs with sensible defaults.. and then you have to go modify the defaults to make it what most people (yes, most) would consider sensible... No, that's not meeting the state use case.
> You can see vi's motions as elegant and purposeful.
Sure I do, and there's so much tacit knowledge that I can't ever explain verbally or in writing that goes into it, to the point that arguments like yours, challenging my "choices" would ever feel less disingenuous. It's like forcing a left-handed kid to hold the pen "correctly", due to religious dogmas. It just works far more naturally for me and thousands of other people, and just because you don't get it, it doesn't make the model useless. Try to see the other side, sometimes "dumb" ideas do work, and shit that works maybe ain't that stupid.
> Doom and Spacemacs without Evil.. yes... but why
Great question. Now maybe you're trying to learn something despite of "years of the opposite experience" feeding to your hubris. Doom offers a set of Lisp macros that come very handy - map!, add-hook!, defadvice!, undefadvice!, add-transient-hook!, etc. - they genuinely can slash the inevitable boilerplate in the config. It's much easier to experiment with advising and instead then writing ad-remove-advice with different syntax, repeating the symbol names, etc., you'd simply prepend `un` to the form and eval it. add-hook! allows binding multiple fns to multiple hooks. And these are just some examples.
Also Doom does some tricks to make the startup blazing fast. Many times I have compared my config (that pulls over 350 packages) with someone else's vanilla. Doom demonstrably starts much faster.
Both Doom and Spacemacs work fine without the vi bindings.
Doom doesn't, it defaults to vi bindings and you can't turn that off easily. Spacemacs does offer a choice, though.
Last time I looked it appeared to be as simple as disabling evil mode and configuring a new leader key. But you're right, it's not a straight configurable.