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Doom Emacs VS Neovim

Compare Doom Emacs VS Neovim and see what are their differences

Doom Emacs logo Doom Emacs

Emacs configuration similar to Spacemacs but faster and lighter.

Neovim logo Neovim

Vim's rebirth for the 21st century
  • Doom Emacs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-21
  • Neovim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23

Doom Emacs features and specs

  • Optimized Performance
    Doom Emacs is engineered to be fast and responsive, minimizing the lag that can be present in a heavily customized Emacs setup.
  • Modular Configuration
    It uses a modular configuration system that allows users to enable or disable individual modules easily, helping tailor Emacs to specific workflows without much hassle.
  • Community Support
    Doom Emacs has an active and helpful community, providing ample support, tutorials, and extensions.
  • Modern Defaults
    It comes with sensible defaults and polished aesthetics out of the box, reducing the need for extensive user configuration.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Doom Emacs provides thorough documentation that helps new and old users understand the configuration options and customization procedures.
  • Evil Mode
    For Vim users, Doom Emacs comes with Evil Mode pre-configured, enabling Vim-like keybindings and making the transition smoother.

Possible disadvantages of Doom Emacs

  • Learning Curve
    Although easier than vanilla Emacs, Doom Emacs still has a learning curve that may be steep for users unfamiliar with Emacs or Vim.
  • Opinionated Setup
    Its opinionated defaults may not suit everyone's preferences, requiring users to spend time customizing it to fit their specific needs.
  • Emacs Dependency
    It relies on the original Emacs distribution, which means you still need to understand and maintain Emacs, adding complexity.
  • Heavy on Resources
    Even though optimized, Doom Emacs is still more resource-intensive compared to lighter editors, potentially impacting performance on older systems.
  • Complexity in Customization
    While modular, the customization can become complex and intimidating, especially for users who need to diverge significantly from the provided defaults.
  • Frequent Updates
    While updates are generally positive, the high frequency of updates can sometimes lead to breaking changes, requiring users to adapt frequently.

Neovim features and specs

  • Extensibility
    Neovim is designed to be highly extensible with a robust API that allows for the development of custom plugins, making it easy to tailor the editor to individual workflows.
  • Asynchronous Plugins
    Support for asynchronous plugins enables smoother and faster performance by allowing tasks like linting and autocomplete to run in the background without freezing the editor.
  • Modern Codebase
    The refactored codebase improves maintainability and introduces new features more efficiently compared to the original Vim.
  • Compatibility
    Neovim maintains compatibility with existing Vim plugins and configuration, making it easier for users to transition from Vim.
  • Improved User Interface
    Neovim provides better support for modern terminal features, GUI interfaces, and offers features like an embedded terminal emulator.

Possible disadvantages of Neovim

  • Lack of Official GUI
    Neovim does not come with an official graphical user interface (GUI), which means users who prefer a graphical experience may need to rely on third-party options.
  • Smaller Community
    Although growing, Neovim’s community is smaller compared to Vim, which means fewer community-created resources and plugins.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might find Neovim’s highly customizable nature and reliance on configuration files challenging, especially if they are not familiar with Vim-type editors.
  • Potential Instability
    Frequent updates and changes can sometimes introduce bugs or instability, which may affect users who rely on a stable environment for their work.
  • Plugin Compatibility
    While most Vim plugins work, some could have compatibility issues or require modification to work with Neovim, necessitating additional effort from the user.

Doom Emacs videos

Doom Emacs - Getting Started

More videos:

  • Review - Doom Emacs For Noobs

Neovim videos

What is Neovim, and why should you care?

More videos:

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Doom Emacs and Neovim)
Text Editors
36 36%
64% 64
IDE
38 38%
62% 62
Software Development
34 34%
66% 66
Knowledge Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Doom Emacs might be a bit more popular than Neovim. We know about 156 links to it since March 2021 and only 108 links to Neovim. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Doom Emacs mentions (156)

  • I just got an ad in VS Code
    Leave? I started with vanilla Emacs a couple of years ago, ran C-h t, did that for an hour or two, and began editing joyfully and it hasn't stopped. Picked up new stuff when the need arose. However, if you want everything looking sexy and modern from the start and you're a cool kid, give this 30 minutes and see what you think: - Source: Hacker News / 16 days ago
  • Helix-gpui: helix gpui front end
    Having used evil-mode as my main driver for years, I can confirm that it truly works as expected. Requires some setup though. I used https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs to do the heavy lifting though. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • M-X Reloaded: The Second Golden Age of Emacs – (Think)
    Yes, you need to install Emacs. It is probably available from whatever package manager your system uses. I prefer Doom (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs) to Spacemacs. However I haven't looked at Spacemacs for many years; perhaps it's now on par with Doom. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • From Doom to Vanilla Emacs
    Ever since I've started my Emacs journey it seemed like the wholy grail to have your own (vanilla!) configuration without any hard dependencies on frameworks like Doom or Spacemacs. There are plenty of dotemacs configurations ouf there which can serve as a great source of inspiration. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Emacs 29.1 Released
    I am a long-time Emacs user and used to maintain my own config, but I switched to Doom Emacs [1] a year ago. Doom Emacs is like a pre-packaged/pre-configured emacs distro. You still need to configure the features that you want to use, but it's a lot easier (and faster) than having to do everything from scratch, and definitely if you already have some emacs background anyway. For me, it makes the newer, more... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
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Neovim mentions (108)

  • My Tech Stack in 2025
    PDE (Personalized Development Environment): Neovim. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Optimizing My Dev Workflow in 2025
    I've used VSCode for years. It's great, no doubt. But when you have to juggle up to 5 projects daily, you'll find that it's going to block you away. Mine feels heavy, especially with multiple windows and extensions. This is why I decided to find an alternative, until I started using NeoVim instead. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
  • Setting Up Neovim for Automad Theme Development
    As the developer of the Automad flat-file content management system, I wanted to make working with Automad themes in Neovim as smooth as possible. Automad has its own templating syntax, so I created tree-sitter-automad to provide proper syntax highlighting. Since it’s not yet an official parser, you need to manually register it in Neovim. To speed up template writing, you can also add custom snippets using... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to turn NEOVIM into an IDE-like code editor in NIXOS?
    Welcome to my optimized Laravel development setup featuring Nvim with LazyVim integration. This configuration is tailored to enhance productivity and streamline the development workflow for Laravel projects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Dear (Rust) Devs: Article Request
    You want to customize your Neovim config but you don't know Lua. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Doom Emacs and Neovim, you can also consider the following products

Evil - The extensible vi layer for Emacs.

VS Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

Org mode - Org: an Emacs Mode for Notes, Planning, and Authoring

Vim - Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

Spacemacs with Python layer - A community-driven Emacs distribution - The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs *and* Vim! - syl20bnr/spacemacs

Sublime Text - Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose - any kind of text file. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features. Fully customizable with macros, and syntax highlighting for most major languages.