Doom Emacs vs my custom Emacs config

I’ve become catatonic over whether to use Doom Emacs or my home-rolled Emacs configuration, so I’m jotting down a few notes to help me think it through.

Doom has very good defaults, looks great, and continues to fine-tune a bunch of behaviors in a way that I generally get along with. (I like it more than the other big contender, Spacemacs). On the other hand, Doom’s behavior feels out of my control and things change frequently, forcing me to pay attention to my editor in a way that I’d rather not. That’s not the way Emacs is supposed to feel. It should feel like it’s 100% mine.

So you can see the dilemma.

This also ties in to my Vim vs Emacs keybinding debate. I have (or had, at least) a decade or more of Vim binding muscle memory. Using stock Emacs bindings for the last couple of years has erased most of that memory. Now I suck at both.

Evil Mode in Doom works great. I want to use it. I tried adding Evil to my own config but its behavior was inconsistent and it would likely take me weeks to build something usable out of it.

Of course I can customize Doom, but in doing too much of that I feel like I’d end up with an unmaintainable combination of done-for-me config and my own tweaks. Worst of both worlds?

So right now I’m using Doom because it’s so very nice. My own config, as light and personal as it is, is missing a lot of Doom’s many niceties. Still measuring the trade-offs.