I'm sure doom and spacemacs are great, but the idea that vanilla emacs is just too hard to use isn't true. Doom and spacemacs are just layers of complexity on t

I'm sure doom and spacemacs are great, but the idea that vanilla emacs is just too hard to use isn't true. Doom and spacemacs are just layers of complexity on top of a very simple concept - install and configure some packages. Using this template you can see there is no black magic there and how easy it is to add packages. You don't need to know any elisp for that. I've been using emacs for years and probably couldn't write a "hello world" in elisp. Configuring packages can be done in the configuration GUI, or else it is just setting some variables - I think I've only ever used 3 eslip functions - (setq), (add-to-list) and (add-hook). Honestly the hardest part of emacs is finding which packages are quality and worth installing. This is where I find doom/spacemacs/prelude emacs useful. I browse their repos every now and then to see what packages are worth trying out - and install them with the built in `package-install` command.