doomemacs/profiles

Doom's profile directory

• Introduction
• How use profiles
• Auto-generated profiles
• Fallback profile
• Gotchas
• How to switch from Chemacs
• But Doom is kinda heavy to be a bootloader…

Introduction

In order to power Doom's soon-to-be generational package manager, I wrote a profile system. This system can effectively replace Chemacs; permitting you to switch between multiple Emacs configs on-demand (and those configs don't have to be Doom configs).

While I work on the formal documentation for this system, I've created this brief guide to walk users through their use. However, for this to work, Doom must live in ~/.emacs.d or ~/.config/emacs. I'll refer to this as $EMACSDIR (and your private Doom config, in ~/.doom.d or ~/.config/doom, as $DOOMDIR).

How use profiles

1. Declare all your profiles in either:

   • One or multiple profile files at:

     • $DOOMDIR/profiles.el
     • $EMACSDIR/profiles.el
     • ~/.config/doom-profiles.el
     • ~/.doom-profiles.el

     Example profiles.el file.

   • Or an implicit profile, which are inferred from the sub-directories of:

     • $DOOMDIR/profiles/
     • $EMACSDIR/profiles/

     Implicit profiles may have a .doomprofile file to apply additional settings. Example .doomprofile.

2. To run $ doom sync whenever you change the above, to regenerate Doom's cached profile loader (generated at $EMACSDIR/profiles/init.X.elc, where X is your major Emacs version).

3. To launch a profile:

   • Launch the profile you want: $ emacs --profile FOO
   • Use bin/doom on the profile you want: $ doom sync --profile FOO

Auto-generated profiles

Doom v3's sandbox and transactional package manager are capable of generating profiles on-the-fly. The former for rapid, isolated testing, and the latter for rollback/snapshot traversal for disaster recovery purposes.

These auto-generated profiles will be stored and versioned in: $XDG_DATA_HOME/doom/$PROFILE_NAME/@/$PROFILE_VERSION/

Fallback profile

Unlike Chemacs, Doom's profiles has no notion of a "default"/fallback profile – rather, the fallback profile is the Doom installation doing the bootloading. This "global" profile is unique in that it won't respect a .doomprofile – in other words, it's not treated as a normal profile.

It is this way so that the profiles system imposes no overhead on users that aren't interested in the profile system (or prefer to use Chemacs).

However, this behavior can be emulated by registering the "global" profile as a profile, and setting $DOOMPROFILE or aliasing emacs, like so:

;; in a profiles.el file
((default)

 ...)

# in .zshrc or .bash_profile
export DOOMPROFILE=default

# Or
alias emacs='emacs --profile default'

Gotchas

There are two caveats with this profile system:

• It requires that Doom live in ~/.config/emacs or ~/.emacs.d. A non-standard install location won't work, unless you use Emacs 29's new --init-directory DIR switch and launch Emacs with emacs --init-directory ~/nonstandard/emacs.d --profile NAME. bin/doom is fine with it, though.

• The profile system can be storage-inefficient. A barebones Doom config averages at ~1mb without installed packages and ~3.75mb with (straight alone is 2.6m). A fully-fledged Doom config can average 500mb-1.4gb; the majority of which are packages, but include server binaries, elisp+native bytecode, and caches add up too.

  To mitigate this, Doom dedups packages across snapshots of a single profile (e.g. profile@23 -> profile@24), but it cannot (yet) do this across profiles (e.g. if profile1 and profile2 both install org). Even then, packages whose recipes change (either locally or upstream) may dodge this deduplication and get cloned anew (to ensure historical integrity) – though this shouldn't happen often, but can build up over time.

  So v3 will introduce a doom gc command, which offers a couple nix.gc-esque switches to control it. E.g.

  • Acts on the "global" profile:

    • doom gc --older-than 21d
    • doom gc --keep 10

  • Act on a specific profile:

    • doom gc --profile foo ...

  • Act on all known profiles

    • doom gc --profiles '*' ...

  Users can change defaults from their init.el or cli.el, or configure doom sync to auto-GC by whatever rules they like. And the good doctor will warn you if you haven't GCed in a while, or you're in excess of some threshold (which I haven't decided yet).

How to switch from Chemacs

1. Delete Chemacs from $EMACSDIR.
2. Install Doom there: $ git clone https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs \~/.config/emacs

3. Move ~/.emacs-profiles.el to ~/.config/doom/profiles.el and transform the string keys to symbols and adapt env entries like so:

   ;; ~/.emacs-profiles.el
   (("default"   (user-emacs-directory . "~/.emacs.default/")
                 (env ("DOOMDIR" . "~/.doom.private/")))
    ("spacemacs" (user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs/"))
    ("prelude"   (user-emacs-directory . "~/prelude/")))
   
   ;; ~/.config/emacs/profiles.el
   ((default   (user-emacs-directory . "~/.emacs.default/")
               ("DOOMDIR" . "~/.doom.private/"))
    (spacemacs (user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs/"))
    (prelude   (user-emacs-directory . "~/prelude/")))

   A comprehensive example of Doom's profiles.el file can be found in docs/examples.org.

   Differences with Chemacs profiles:

   • Keys are symbols, not strings.
   • Doom's profiles.el has a syntax for evaluating code, expanding paths, and appending/prepending to variables (with deferral). See the examples.org link above.
   • Doom's profile system won't install Straight.el for you.
   • Doom does not have a special "default" profile. If you don't specify a –profile, it will simply start up the Doom config living in ~/.config/emacs. See the "Fallback profile" section below for a workaround.
4. Then launch a profile. E.g. $ emacs --profile prelude.

But Doom is kinda heavy to be a bootloader…

I agree! To remedy that, I'll soon split Doom up into three projects: its core (where its bootloader lives), its official modules, and its community contributed modules. At that point, Doom will be much lighter!