I tried Emacs very briefly for the first time a few years ago. However, the really terrible default keybindings put me off using vanilla Emacs, I neglected to try Evil Mode, and back then Spacemacs was hard to get working and slow to load. But, having trouble this week trying to get an Org-mode plugin working in either Vim or Neovim, I decided to give Emacs another try.

Some research suggested that in addition to vanilla Emacs with Evil Mode being a possible good starting place for me, Spacemacs had improved a lot, and another option called Doom Emacs was worth looking at. Which one to choose though? Being an Emacs noob, I didn’t know enough to make an informed decision and I didn’t wan’t to commit until I better understood the tradeoffs.

Searching for a way to run multiple Emacs configurations took me to this excellent video and now I can run all three concurrently with chemacs2:

Vanilla Emacs, DoomEmacs, and Spacemacs running side by side thanks to Chemacs2