I can confirm a lot of what has already been said. I've used spacemacs since 2017, have contributed to it, and have written several private layers for it, such as a custom org layer.

But I switch to Doom emacs literally two weeks ago and I'm never going back. I find doom to be much faster not just startup time but in general responsiveness (one major exception: hitting SPC and waiting for key binding tips to show seems to be much slower in doom than spacemacs). Other than that I found doom to be much easier to configure and much more configurable.

The major selling point for me was that in doom emacs there is much much less ceremony in wrapping a new package in a module, and more importantly it is _easier_ to reuse documentation for those packages because most packages provide configuration examples using `use-package` anyway. My only hangup was less documentation around writing custom modules which took me about a day to figure out (I would advise to just read some of the source code or mimic a module that doom ships with).

YMMV, but if you feel like you've attained a certain level of emacs maturity, I would 100% recommend trying it out. Be prepared that some modules, like the haskell module, don't ship with a lot of keybindings so you'll have to set those up yourself.

I switched. Doom starts much faster and feels generally snappier and more minimal. I like the configuration system. I use this Spacemacs module for Doom[0] to retain (most of) the Spacemacs keybindings and some of the functionality.

[0] https://github.com/chenyanming/spacemacs_module_for_doom

I did, I used spacemacs for a few years, but switched to Doom at the beginning of 2020. It is dramatically faster in start up and usage. I also find the configuration a lot easier and straightforward. I did the initial switch because Java LSP was stalling out spacemacs constantly.

I tried, when Spacemacs was somehow broken on my system. I didn't find anything better on Doom, and fixing Spacemacs was easier than switching to Doom. Using Doom, most of your muscle memory from Spacemacs is gone because not everything is configured the same (that is of course normal). But not all, and that make the experience weird to me.

I also feel like Spacemacs is growing faster and has more feature than Doom, because more dev's are working on Spacemacs. But I might be wrong about that.

I got into to emacs again about six months ago. Having not used it for about a decade, Spacemacs was a wonderful introduction to what is possible in Emacs today. I’ve since moved on to a personal straight/use-package based init with a relatively minimal package set centered on the vertico/embark ecosystem, but I remain fond of spacemacs and still look to it for ideas.

Really, I’m surprised we haven’t seen Prot on the front page here.

I’ve gone in this direction after using Spacemacs for a couple of years. I’ve found

- Startup speed much quicker though I do use emacsclient so this is only an issue on first launch

- Overall feels a lot more snappy

- Simpler and more straight forward configuration

- Updates seem to break less (though sadly this isn’t reduced to zero, just reduced).