Respecting visual lines in Doom Emacs

When using writing modes such as Org or Markdown in Emacs, I use visual-line-mode and prefer that vertical movements (using j & k) operate via visual lines and not logical ones. This does not seem to be the default behavior of Doom Emacs. Of course there’s a setting for this and of course I needed to look it up; evil-respect-visual-line-mode.

I tried adding the following to my config.el…

(setq evil-respect-visual-line-mode t)

It didn’t work. I learned that the setting had to be configured before loading Evil. But how to do that in Doom? I first tried moving it into Emacs 27’s new early-init.el, which worked, but since early-init.el is part of Doom and not part of my personal config, I didn’t love that solution.

The answer was to use Doom’s use-package-hook! in init.el, like so…

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(use-package-hook! evil
  :pre-init
  (setq evil-respect-visual-line-mode t) ;; sane j and k behavior
  t)

Much better. If there’s a more appropriate way, let me know.