Since reading your comment, I have gotten very excited about Doom Emacs in the last 45 minutes.
But, now I realize this is a very powerful configuration of Emacs if and only if you prefer using the VI keybindings.
It looks like spacemacs is that as well.
I actually enjoy Emacs keybindings, and would like to find something as polished and supported as Doom, but without using VI keybindings.
Does anyone know where I should look for that?
Or, can I revert to emacs keybindings in Doom and use the rest of the amazing features? I'm concerned I might be swimming against a tsunami if I try to do that and would be better off finding another project.
Alternative opinion that you completely didn't ask for: I wouldn't bother with Doom, or any of the other pre-packaged Emacs distributions. If you like the default Emacs bindings, I would suggest just... using Emacs.
Unconfigured Emacs is a bit clunky, but you'll understand it a lot better if you configure it yourself. Also, just in my opinion, there are better options than the packages supplied by Doom.
My suggestion is to set up Emacs with use-package for package configuration (this will be in Emacs 29 anyway), and then you can easily play around with different package combinations.
I'd add a nice-looking theme first of all, then try adding the following modern packages, one at a time. Play around with them a bit before adding another so you know what they do.
As mentioned, you can disable evil mode in spacemacs or doom.
There's also prelude which doesn't include evil by default. Not quite as fully featured as doom/spacemacs, but it's a good place to start.
All that said, you could just set it up from scratch. Now that lsp-mode and dap-mode are things, you can setup a fully featured IDE in not very much config at all. I have everything in my init.el and setting up projectile, lsp-mode and dap-mode which is like 85% of what you need for a fully featured IDE. That bit is only about 30 lines of config. Throw in flycheck, company-mode, hydra for keybindings. maybe treemacs for a project view.. a few hundred other lines to make it not all look like trash....
On second thought, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Just use clion or vscode or something.
Can't I beg you to share your init.el? I want LSP and the other stuff but Doom even when turning off evil mode seems to far away from the emacs I'm familiar with.
While Doom defaults to Vi bindings with evil mode (and has awesome defaults to use evil mode almost for all modules) I don't think it's mandatory at all and you should be able to enjoy it without evil (I haven't tried but after all, non-evil key bindings are the default on Emacs :) )
I had the same realization...so I took some bits of doomemacs/spacemacs and incorporated it into my personal emacs configuration. I am not great at maintaining my config or writing elisp in general, but feel free to reference my config if you wanted to take a stab at creating a doomemacs-like experience with your own configuration choices:
Disclaimer: This config is a bit perpetually dusty at this point, so I wouldn't copy it verbatim but instead use it as inspiration for some packages that might be worth looking into. JFYI anything that is from Marmelade might be worth avoiding as I suspect it is unmaintained given it's SSL cert expired in 2018. I just haven't gotten around to removing it from my config.
Spacemacs on initial start-up, it will prompt you to choose either evil mode (vi) or holy mode (standard emacs) keybindings. Before I went to vanilla emacs, I was a spacemacs user using the 'holy mode.'
But, now I realize this is a very powerful configuration of Emacs if and only if you prefer using the VI keybindings.
It looks like spacemacs is that as well.
I actually enjoy Emacs keybindings, and would like to find something as polished and supported as Doom, but without using VI keybindings.
Does anyone know where I should look for that?
Or, can I revert to emacs keybindings in Doom and use the rest of the amazing features? I'm concerned I might be swimming against a tsunami if I try to do that and would be better off finding another project.