I made the switch from spacemacs to doom a while ago. I remember some minor differences in evil key bindings, which led to minor cursing, but then my brain adapted.

I feel I spend less time on config in doom. I remember diffing synching spacemacs config with changes made by spacemacs authors. I found it a bit picky.

I like the doom command line doom sync and doom upgrade .

there is an active discord channel for doom as well.

I leaned havily on https://github.com/ericdallo/dotfiles/tree/master/.doom.d when setting up.

On Zane's recommendation I use evil-lisp-state and am happy with it. https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C01GE5PD249/p1636482891011400?thread_ts=1636434642.010200&cid=C01GE5PD249

I will look into adding evil-cleverparens and evil-lisp-state - I like using 'raise' during code refactor when simplifying code.

I've copied some code over from the dotspacemac/user-config section into my doom config It feels like there will be a lot more code to come as some key bindings are very unnatural and awkward to type, a few default are okay. Quite a few features dont seem to work as well, such as smartparens (which is much smarter in Spacemacs) so there must be something else to configure

I don't think people will find my doom config as easy to adopt as the spacemacs config I created, but should have useful pieces to borrow from. If I find a good Magit like client for Neovim, I'd probably drop Doom and use Neovim and Conjure. But still much to evaluate...

I'm very used to evil mode, and may give Neovim a shot someday, out of curiosity mostly. Is the idea that less knobs and dials to twirl would mean less time twirling knobs and dials?

I was Neovim curious due to the Conjure project for Clojure, treesitter support for LSP and being able to write 99% of the Neovim config in Fennel (a lisp dialect). There are a few community configurations for Neovim, but none of them fitted those three criteria, so I embarked on a journey into Neovim and the smorgasbord of plugins... it was a confusing and far too time consuming journey, but I did end up creating a configuration that feels quite nice to use - https://practical.li/neovim/ I quite like the asthetics of telescope (selection/narrowing) and some other packages (todos) that are nicer in Neovim that Spacemacs or Doom. There are still some efficiencies from Spacemacs I havent yet replicated, so still use Spacemacs for work, but nice to have a good setup for Neovim as an alternative.

Neovim (and vim) are extremely configurable. The documentation is extremely extensive, although at a low level of abstraction, so very useful for building tools and command in Neovim once you know what you want to do. Found it harder to understand how to do lots of fairly simple things initially, but once you have a basic understanding it kind of makes sense. Most of the Practicalli Neovim config has abstracted things to more of a Spacemacs / which-key style, so I avoid a lot of the detailed low-level actions in Neovim.

Thanks @U05254DQM, you are a fount of experience and information!

Thank you for your appreciation and questions, it helps keep me motivated to create more.