I agree with r/cljnewbie2019. Unless you are already a champion Vimmer, start with a standard, vanilla Emacs. I was a Vimmer for 23+ years and started using Spacemacs (something like Doom but Doom is much better), but soon got off that and rolled my own evil configuration. I’ve been using Emacs with evil bindings for around 5 years now, and find it suits me well for my current business needs.

But when I have some time, I will switch to vanilla Emacs bindings. Why? Because basically all the documentation for Emacs, plus 99.99% of the packages, are built and documented for vanilla Emacs. Some very nice package will not work at all when using Evil, so you either have to find an Evil version of it, build your own, or do without.

So unless you have good reason to use Doom, you might want to do something else. Doom gives you a “menu structure” by grouping various functions under a prefix key binding. Instead, you could leave the menu bar in place which would give you much of that menu structure. Doom has a good way to configure packages, but it’s the “Doom way or the highway”, and you will find that most packages do not have documentation for Doom installation…so you better know that way of configuring.

OTOH, Doom is highly optimized for speed and for those coming over from the Vim world, it is an excellent choice when making the switch to Emacs. All your ex commands will work as expected, but you’ll use the Doom menu (which is pretty good).

Whatever you do, check out General.el for key bindings. It will make your like a LOT easier when setting up key bindings. Just DDG or google “emacs general.el”. This package will tickle your happy place. It will easily do standard vanilla or Evil key bindings.