I’m also a long time vim user. I basically cannot edit text without vim keybindings these days. A few weeks back I decided to give emacs a third try, after ins

I’m also a long time vim user. I basically cannot edit text without vim keybindings these days. A few weeks back I decided to give emacs a third try, after installing it once a while ago and giving up, installing it again with spacemacs a bit later and giving up when I couldn’t figure out what layer of that behemoth errors were coming from or how to fix them. Anyway, I finally decided to give it another shot with vanilla, with the first thing to do being to get evil mode working (which is vim keybindings). Getting to that point was a struggle, honestly. I felt handicapped without vim bindings, and I ran into some errors downloading packages after I added MELPA to my .emacs file. After an hour or two, I managed to get evil mode going, and I guess just the little bit of familiarity in what was otherwise a VERY overwhelming and unfamiliar experience made everything feel much easier. Getting to where it was easy to install and see the effects of new plugins one at a time rather than getting the massive overload of spacemacs was super helpful. It made the learning curve smoother for sure. I mostly did all of this because I wanted to try org mode, and honestly that has been amazing. It’s a very very good way of taking notes and tracking tasks. I’ll probably spend some time next time I’m feeling like tinkering trying to get it more like an IDE, but for now I’m happy just with org mode.