[!CAUTION]
doomemacs.com is not associated with nor endorsed by this project!
doomemacs.org is our one and only domain. Read our announcement about it
here.
Table of Contents
Introduction
It is a story as old as time. A stubborn, shell-dwelling, and melodramatic
vimmer—envious of the features of modern text editors—spirals into
despair before he succumbs to the dark side. This is his config.
Doom is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs tailored for Emacs bankruptcy
veterans who want less framework in their frameworks, a modicum of stability
(and reproducibility) from their package manager, and the performance of a hand
rolled config (or better). It can be a foundation for your own config or a
resource for Emacs enthusiasts to learn more about our favorite operating
system.
Its design is guided by these mantras:
- Gotta go fast. Startup and run-time performance are priorities. Doom goes
beyond by modifying packages to be snappier and load lazier.
- Close to metal. There's less between you and vanilla Emacs by design.
That's less to grok and less to work around when you tinker. Internals ought
to be written as if reading them were part of Doom's UX, and it is!
- Opinionated, but not stubborn. Doom is about reasonable defaults and
curated opinions, but use as little or as much of it as you like.
- Your system, your rules. You know better. At least, Doom hopes so! It
won't automatically install system dependencies (and will force plugins not
to either). Rely on
doom doctor to tell you what's missing.
- Nix/Guix is a great idea! The Emacs ecosystem is temperamental. Things
break and they break often. Disaster recovery should be a priority! Doom's
package management should be declarative and your private config reproducible,
and comes with a means to roll back releases and updates (still a WIP).
Check out the FAQ for answers to common questions about the project.
Features
- Minimalistic good looks inspired by modern editors.
- Curated and sane defaults for many packages, (major) OSes, and Emacs itself.
- A modular organizational structure for separating concerns in your config.
- A standard library designed to simplify your elisp bike shedding.
- A declarative package management system (powered by
straight.el) with a command line interface. Install packages from anywhere,
not just (M)ELPA, and pin them to any commit.
- Optional vim emulation powered by evil-mode, including ports of popular vim
plugins like vim-sneak, vim-easymotion, vim-unimpaired and
more!
- Opt-in LSP integration for many languages, using lsp-mode or eglot
- Support for many programming languages. Includes syntax highlighting,
linters/checker integration, inline code evaluation, code completion (where
possible), REPLs, documentation lookups, snippets, and more!
- Support for many tools, like docker, pass, ansible, terraform, and more.
- A Spacemacs-esque keybinding scheme, centered around leader
and localleader prefix keys (SPC and SPCm for
evil users, C-c and C-c l for vanilla users).
- A rule-based popup manager to control how temporary buffers
are displayed (and disposed of).
- Per-file indentation style detection and editorconfig integration. Let
someone else argue about tabs vs spaces.
- Project-management tools and framework-specific minor modes with their own
snippets libraries.
- Project search (and replace) utilities, powered by ripgrep and ivy or
helm.
- Isolated and persistent workspaces (also substitutes for vim tabs).
- Support for Chinese and Japanese input systems.
- Save a snapshot of your shell environment to a file for Emacs to load at
startup. No more struggling to get Emacs to inherit your
PATH, among other
things.
Prerequisites
- Required:
- GNU Emacs 27.1–31.1 (31.1 is recommended)
- Using only Doom's CLI requires 27.1+
- Using Doom as a starter kit requires 29.1+
- Git >= 2.23
- ripgrep >= 11.0
- Optional, but recommended:
- fd 7.3.0+ (used to improve file indexing performance)
- GNU variants of
find, ls, and tar (on MacOS and BSD *nix)
- Symbola font (Emacs' fallback font for glyphs it can't display)
[!WARNING]
Avoid unstable and pre-release builds of Emacs. These end in .50, .60,
or .9X (e.g. 28.1.91). Doom should generally work on Emacs HEAD (the
maintainer dogfoods it), but support lags behind the bleeding edge by at least
a month or so.
[!IMPORTANT]
Doom is comprised of ~150 optional modules, some of which may have
additional dependencies. Visit their documentation or run bin/doom doctor to check for any that you may have missed.
Install
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/doomemacs/core ~/.config/emacs
~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install
Then read our Getting Started guide to be walked through
installing, configuring and maintaining Doom Emacs.
It's a good idea to add ~/.config/emacs/bin to your PATH! Other bin/doom
commands you should know about:
doom sync to synchronize your private config with Doom by installing missing
packages, removing orphaned packages, and regenerating caches. Run this
whenever you modify your private init.el or packages.el, or install/remove
an Emacs package through your OS package manager (e.g. mu4e or agda).doom sync --env to include a snapshot of your shell environment that Doom
will load at startup. This allows Emacs to inherit your PATH, among other
things. This replaces
exec-path-from-shell.doom upgrade to update Doom to the latest release & all installed packages.doom doctor to diagnose common issues with your system and config.
Roadmap
Doom is an active and ongoing project. To make that development more
transparent, its roadmap (and other concerns) are published across three github
project boards and a newsletter:
- Development Roadmap
- Packages under review:
lists plugins we are watching and considering for inclusion, and what their
status for inclusion is. Please consult this list before requesting new
packages/features.
- Upstream bugs: lists
issues that originate from elsewhere, and whether or not we have local
workarounds or temporary fixes for them.
Doom's newsletter (not finished) will contain changelogs in between
releases.
Getting help
Emacs is no journey of a mere thousand miles. You will run into problems and
mysterious errors. When you do, here are some places you can look for help:
- Our documentation covers many use cases.
- With Emacs built-in help system documentation is a keystroke away:
- For functions: SPC h f or C-h f
- For variables: SPC h v or C-h v
- For a keybind: SPC h k or C-h k
- To search available keybinds: SPC h b b or C-h b b
- Run
bin/doom doctor to detect common issues with your development
environment and private config.
- Check out the FAQ or Community FAQs, in case your question
has already been answered.
- Search Doom's issue tracker
in case your issue was already reported.
- Hop on our Discord server; it's active and friendly! Keep an eye on
the #announcements channel, where I announce breaking updates and releases.
Contribute
Doom is a labor of love and incurable madness, but I'm only one guy. Doom
wouldn't be where it is today without your help. I welcome contributions of any
kind!
- I :heart: pull requests and bug reports (see the Contributing
Guidelines)!
- Don't hesitate to tell me my Elisp-fu
sucks, but please
tell me why.
- Hop on our Discord server and say hi! Help others, hang out or talk
to me about Emacs, gamedev, programming, physics, pixel art, anime, gaming --
anything you like. Nourish this lonely soul.
- If you'd like to support my work financially, buy me a drink through
liberapay or paypal. My work contends with studies, adventures in indie
gamedev and freelance work. Donations help me allocate more time to my Emacs
and OSS capers.
LLM Policy
Generative AI is not used in the development of this project (except to test,
debug, and improve LLM
modules).
LLM-generated (or assisted) contributions are highly discouraged, but
tolerated so long as they meet the following criteria:
- LLM-generated contributions are small,
- LLM-use is disclosed,
- Issue and pull request templates are followed (it is disruptive when LLMs omit key information and AI disclosures, or follow arbitrary heading structures),
- Your
M-x doom/info must be uploaded as a file, not published as text in the issue/PR.[^1]
- A human responds to reviews and questions.
Failing that, related issues/PRs will be immediately closed and refused with
notice. Repeat offenders will be banned.
[^1]: A file-upload is used because doom-infos are filled with keywords that pollute search engine results and make issues harder for users/maintainers to find.
Doom Emacs is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs — fast, opinionated and modular, built to feel as snappy as a hand-rolled config. You can run it as-is or use it as the foundation for your own setup.