evil-smartparens VS straight.el

Very dated and next to useless on large complex CPP codebases. Use a language server. I recommend the straight package manager. https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el

Have you tried using straight.el or the heir-apparent Elpaca? These package managers will check out the git repo of said packages, and you can easily fork them with magit and forge. That's that I do to contribute to packages.

Thank you for your time addressing all those issues and sorry if questions were misinformed - I found your advices invaluable to understand design goals of package managers in emacs.

I used straight.el, now I use Elpaca.

Doom Emacs is not a package manager. It has a package manager, which is based on Straight.el.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

First install straight.el (https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el)

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

If you use straight and override package, you'll get a lot of your desired functionality for free. Straight's docs are excellent. I started banging away on my own setup from scratch, and while not perfect, it does what I want and the total startup time is about 1.5 seconds without doing anything to try to optimize it. If you want to see it, check it out here. Like I said, there is lots of room for improvement, but it does work for me.