27 ms·

SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim

223 points by wsdjeg 10y ago

chrismorgan 10y ago
… and people wonder why I dislike Markdown. (There are fairly radical rendering differences between the GitHub page and the spacevim.org page, because different Markdown renderers with different bugs have been used, and the Markdown was fairly sloppily written.)
- ticoombs 10y ago
  Is there a linter yet for markdown?
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    There's quite a few (outside of vim), such as https://github.com/mivok/markdownlint https://github.com/mivok/markdownlint and https://github.com/SublimeText-Markdown/MarkdownEditing https://github.com/SublimeText-Markdown/MarkdownEditing
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- scrollaway 10y ago
  It looks like whatever Github pages is using as renderer (kramdown iirc?) does not support postfix links like [dein.vim] here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim/dev/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim/dev/READ... The table rendering issues I suspect are from the lack of a newline after the headers. I don't know whether it's correct or not because, yknow, markdown. Still better than rst. :)
  - chrismorgan 10y ago
    reStructuredText is at least consistent. And extensible. And secure. It has a decent spec, as well. It’s just a pity that it never gained widespread acceptance or other implementations and is thus effectively tied to Python. I like reStructuredText and work in it regularly. I’m sad that Markdown with all its terrible inconsistency, lack of extensibility, insecurity, &c. has prevailed.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      The reasons why Markdown is popular are I think very similar to why HTML is popular. In its first years, it was loosely specced, very liberal in what it accepted and was parsed differently by different implementations (browsers). When this actually became a real problem, HTML5 came out to spec it much more rigorously. RST in that picture is XHTML. Rigorous spec, but very picky with the input. Typo? Your whole document won't render. I've been bitten by XHTML and I've been bitten by RST. The experiences are very similar. I agree with the need for a more rigorous spec but like with HTML it still needs to be liberal with its input. So that's what we need, and I just hope it doesn't take years to come into existence. An HTML5 for markdown. And we shall call it MD5!
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Yes I recognized the markdown fails from my own markdown fails. Especially when you move repos between github and bitbucket, and expect README.md to 'just work', it seldom does. I've gone between md, org and even rst. They are all great, but still suck in curious ways. pandoc helps but it is a whole kettle of fermented fish in itself.
  - chrismorgan 10y ago
    One big hint: leave blank lines between block elements. (It’s the same in reStructuredText, except that it actually complains if you do it incorrectly rather than being silently inconsistent as all Markdown implementations that I know of are.) Not doing that is the main thing that’s wreaking havoc here.
johncoltrane 10y ago
No. Spacevim makes vim works _differently_.
- allover 10y ago
  To be fair that's the submitter's title, it's not from the SpaceVim site.
  - auscompgeek 10y ago
    The submitter is also the author of SpaceVim. Perhaps this should be a "Show HN" instead?
mavdi 10y ago
Can't get it to work properly, it seems to be very buggy currently or cerain instructions are missing.
krzyk 10y ago
Ok, but what it is? The page doesn't explain it. The top page explanation refers to spacemacs and most vim users don't know spacemacs. Is it a vim plus a bundle of plugins? EDIT: Cleaned up the spacemacs sentence.
- Shicholas 10y ago
  it's emacs with vim controls. FWIW, I wouldn't compare emacs with vim in this set up, but with something like tumx instead (and imo what emacs offers is better than tmux).
  - TheDong 10y ago
    They're not asking what space-emacs is, but what this linked page is. This page is not emacs. This page is just a bunch of neovim plugins, as OP surmised.
  - bn-usd-mistake 10y ago
    No it's not. This is actually vim, just with some configuration and plugins. You are probably talking about [Spacemacs](http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/)?
- arnarbi 10y ago
  It's a distribution, bundling vim with a whole bunch of plugins and configuration that's supposed to work out of the box. Spacemacs is the same for Emacs.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    Thanks, that's the tldr I was looking for too.
  - jasonm23 10y ago
    I wish people stopped calling a shared config a 'distribution' In both Spacemacs and Spacevim, all that's being provided is a config. No runtime, no package manager, no changes to the actual binaries of either app. It's hyperbole.
madmax108 10y ago
The greatest dev timesaving tip that someone gave me was to clear my .vimrc and start off with a blank slate. vim is a language in itself [1] and it's easy to try to mimic someone who has conversational fluency in it, but as with languages, the only way to learn in practice from the start. Projects like SpaceVim try to create an IDE like environment, but because of being terminal driven, it's difficult for anyone to "discover" features. You end up with a large distribution with barely used features. Instead by growing and maintaining your own vimrc, you get something that can be both used everywhere (dotfiles and Github FTW) and work FOR you. At the end of the day, vim is JUST another tool to make you work more efficiently. Trust me. "truncate -s 0 ~/.vimrc" and take the time to learn. You won't regret it in the long run. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10315645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10315645
- shmerl 10y ago
  truncate -s 0 ~/.vimrc Shorter way: > ~/.vimrc
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    Not really shorter as I have to Ctrl+C to get back to shell afterwards. Anyways my zsh has noclobber set so your command fails with error: zsh: file exists: ~/.vimrc
    - stplsd 10y ago
      > ~/.vimrc works on bash, but it hangs on zsh because it treats it like cat > ~/.vimrc (> without any command in front of it is not well defined in POSIX) So portable way to do this is like this: :> ~/.vimrc
  - stplsd 10y ago
    Or to be completely portable :> ~/.vimrc
  - dotancohen 10y ago
    Smarter way: $ mv ~/.vimrc ~/vimrc-reference
caconym_ 10y ago
I started using Spacemacs recently for its out-of-the-box IDE-like features but the layers' functionality seems to be fairly hit-or-miss and overall the impression is one of a bug-infested nightmare. Every time I try to set up my environment on a new machine, I get some new set of problems that I have no idea how to solve (disappearing powerline, broken neotree, weird projectile caching behavior totally breaking my workflow, busted syntax checking, and more). I don't blame the Spacemacs folks for this; I actually think what they've done is really cool. Emacs simply is what it is, I think. I don't have time nor inclination to learn elisp and build/fix my own environment. When it does work, it's great. But the inconsistency is probably going to drive me away, back to Vim. I think that if anyone can build a similar thing for Vim that actually works, I'll use it in a heartbeat.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  I have the exact opposite experience with vanilla Emacs. It works consistently without issue. Regarding plugins you can use melpa and track the latest release of everything at all times. You can use melpa and update most stuff infrequently save for the ones that are most important to you. You can use melpa stable and run only stable versions of everything. You can use melpa stable and run newer versions of a minority of plugins that are important to you. What plugins you choose to use and and whether you choose stable or unstable could very well lead to vastly different experiences. The best strategy is to carefully select plugins which are useful to you and high quality, and run the stable versions of most things updating your tools infrequently when a new major release adds something that looks useful to you.
- hxegon 10y ago
  I had the same experience with spacemacs, but it made me realize what I was missing with vim. Currently trying to build up an emacs/evil config from scratch.
- brudgers 10y ago
  That's a general problem with many 'frameworks'. When something goes off the happy path, the abstraction is gone and the user is dealing with the underlying abstractions. Elisp for Spacemacs; JavaScript for the hotness of the month, and X11 for Ubuntu. I don't think it's really possible to build something like Spacemacs for Vim because of the different underlying architectural decisions. Vim is a one-thing-only-and-do-it-well tool. Emacs is 'an operating system missing a decent text edtior'.
shmerl 10y ago
I'm using neovim as is. Is it a wrapper around it?
- Gaelan 10y ago
  It's essentially a premade vimrc (.nvim/config) and set of packages.
towb 10y ago
Yay for the effort! But personally I don't think this is a good way to learn and use vim. The strength of vim is to customise it after your own needs and you'll do yourself a disservice if you end up with a config that you don't know and don't use more than x percent of.
- scribu 10y ago
  I agree, the usefulness of a "distribution" like this is getting some fresh ideas about how to customise the editor. For example, this site listed some useful plugins that I didn't know about, such as https://github.com/bogado/file-line https://github.com/bogado/file-line
  - thatmiddleway 10y ago
    Yea, this is always the big value for me from these distributions. I can always find a cool plugin or bit of vimscript that I didn't know about.
xkxx 10y ago
Oh, yeah! Good old curl | sh via HTTP. Fucking awesome. I wonder how many people get unknowingly pwned while executing such curl | sh instructions. It's not hard at all to MitM HTTP, detect if shellcode is being transmitted, then add your own instructions to it. Or you can just compile a list of known sources that encourage to execute curl | sh and MitM only them if you want to make your exploits even more discreet. What a nice way to get yourself your own little botnet. Way to go! There's a catch though. You need access to infrastructure of ISP. But is it that hard to get such access? No.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  curl sh is no more dangerous than running any script you haven't read, or binary you haven't decompiled for that matter. The odds of mitm are exactly the same.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    No, installing a package using my package manager will a) ensure this exact binary/script is GPG signed by someone I ostensibly trust b) ensure it's not been tampered with by a MitM between the hosting server and my computer This reduces my risk exposure to "creator of software X (or distro packager Y) has turned rogue", which is many orders of magnitude less likely than "website of software X got pwned, or someone is MitM-ing me".
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      That does not invalidate what I said.
      - bigbugbag 10y ago
        It absolutely does. You trust the distro maintainer and have a security mechanism to ensure the scripts and binaries have not been tampered with. So virtually no risk of MitM and very little risk of malicious scripts and binaries. Reading script and decompiling binaries does not imply you understand every thing they do, but it does imply that you have an unlimited amount of time which is impractical at best.
Shicholas 10y ago
just wanted to say thanks to the people who maintain this. I love spacemacs! first editor I picked up where the defaults get me >95% of what I want.
slax0r 10y ago
FYI, if your ~/.vim dir is a symlink, the install script will fail to properly symlink ~/.SpaceVim to ~/.vim
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> Like spacemacs, but for vim. This is one of the most obtuse project descriptions I've seen. If you're making a...whatever this is...aimed at Vim users, why would you expect them to be familiar with a something-or-other for Emacs?
- verandaguy 10y ago
  Not to mention that (IIRC) Spacemacs involves installing evil-mode, which makes Emacs interactions similar to Vim interactions. Taking that into account, this can be interpreted as "It makes Vim work more like Vim."
  - AtticHacker 10y ago
    Or it could be interpreted as "Make Vim use Emacs keys!"
  - eyko 10y ago
    The main difference is that in Spacemacs, you hit the space bar and you get suggestions of commands to use, then you can narrow those down by navigating those groups. For example, if you want search your project for a file, you would hit the space bar then type "p" (for project). At that point a number of choices appears, e.g. "f" (IIRC) is to find files in your project. After a while it becomes sort of second nature: SPC f s - file save SPC m t f - mode test file (e.g. if you're in a go file it'd know how to run tests for go files). Another nice thing is that `SPC ?` brings up a prompt that lets you search for commands: you type a keyword for example and you get all the editor commands that match your keyword, so it's easy to navigate your editor shortcuts. That was useful for me, since every result came with the "spacemacs" shortcut, and the Emacs shortcut, so I ended up learning Emacs for free (I was coming from Vim). Note: I've also tried Spacevim and the only thing it has in common with Spacemacs is the mnemonic key bindings. It doesn't seem to be discoverable (at least not with SPC ?) and it also doesn't seem to be consistent (I couldn't "guess" what certain things were, in spacemacs it's consistent enough that you can guess). Those are the main core pillars imho: http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#core-pillars http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#core-pillars
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xkxx 10y ago
I think scrollaway is here to troll. No need to reply to him seriously. You may reply to him in a humorous manner or just scroll away from his comments, just like his nick recommends us to do.
- dang 10y ago
  Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. You've already broken HN's civility rules more than once. Please (re)-read the following and stop doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316485 and marked it off-topic.
Philipp__ 10y ago
I don't get Spacemacs hype. I tried it, and never felt comfortable using it. Started with blank .emacs.d, yeah I completely cleard whole configuration two or three times until I hit sweetspot. Now I'm sitting on ~250 loc config on vanilla emacs (including evil), and eveything works like a charm. Plus I learned a lot about elisp. I never liked those bundles and distributions. They always felt redundant, but I can understand the appeal to some people.
- the_duke 10y ago
  I would probably spend more than 100 hours until I got to a point of equivalence with SpaceMacs, starting from a plain emacs. Especially since I use quite a few different languages. Ain't nobody got time for that...
  - tom_mellior 10y ago
    The OP's point was not "equivalence", it was a "sweet spot". Even with "quite a few different languages", if the standard Emacs modes are close enough to the sweet spot, you don't need Spacemacs.
    - the_duke 10y ago
      It's a matter of preference and dedication. Some love bringing their emacs/vim setup to their own perfection and spend a lot of time on it. Other are too lazy for that and are fine with a preconfigured setup like SpaceMacs. Whatever you prefer. My point just was, for someone like me, SpaceMacs is a truly awesome project.
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    The point is how much of Spacemacs you end up using?! And in which languages you work? Because, what consumes your time is not setup, with use-package setup becomes trivial really, what sucks you in is learning the plugins and how they work (cider, ensime, alchemist, magit, merlin, those are serious environments not just syntax/autocomplete plugins). Idk if they come with spacemacs, I doubt it, but what then makes the difference if they come with Spacemacs or not, since most of the time you will spent on learning them, and not setting them up. Spacemacs is so customized that it is like learning new editor from ground up, at least for me. Last year I spent solely using and learning Emacs, to the point where every command and keybinds made sense, before that I used Vim for years. After one year of training I decided to install EVIL, and now I am enjoying Emacs and Vim a lot. Yesterday I downloaded spacemacs, opened it and I was like, ugh, wtf now?! I just go overwhelmed by the amount of preexisting code which I did not understand, and needed to crash a lot of hours to get everything from ground zero.
drKarl 10y ago
This uses NeoVim, for a similar bundle using Vim there's some options like Steve Francia's https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim (called Ultimate Vim Distribution)
fao_ 10y ago
What exactly is a "premium colourscheme"?
- justRafi 10y ago
  when I coined it, I was thinking about color-schemes that are aesthetic and well maintained.
hollander 10y ago
The install guide: vim sh mv ~/.vimrc ~/.vimrc_bak mv ~/.vim ~/.vim_bak git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.vim nvim sh git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.config/nvim Why do people always expect the average joe user to understand this? What do I do with this? Do I run this in the terminal? Then what? First line opens Vim and it opens 11 files. Now what? This seems like the average explanation that works for the person who writes it, but is useless unless you know this already.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  for vim do: sh mv ~/.vimrc ~/.vimrc_bak mv ~/.vim ~/.vim_bak git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.vim for nvim do: sh git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.config/nvim I'm guessing markdown fail.
- yrro 10y ago
  Particularly annoying given that Vim 8 (finally!) has a perfectly fine packaging system.
- letientai299 10y ago
  Check their github page, there's a (or 2) different install instruction(s).
leblancfg 10y ago
Tried Spacemacs 3-4 times because of org mode. Most specifically inline code block execution, through org-babel. Still not ready to change over from vim, though. What I haven't done is check neovim. Any comments regarding the potential for inline code execution?
- chestervonwinch 10y ago
  Org-mode comes standard with plain emacs (no need for all the extra bells and whistles that come with spacemacs, necessarily). Since you're a vim user, try installing evil as a first plugin, and only adding additional ones as you see fit. I found that spacemacs did too much and preferred vanilla emacs + evil + a few python plugins. Still, I mostly use vim for smaller scripts. Emacs is better as an IDE in my opinion. In my experience, you really can't beat Org-mode when it comes to inline code execution. You can preview LaTex and plotting inline as well. Plus, you can of course export the document into a variety of formats (HTML, PDF, etc.), which are quite customizable thereafter. Here is a document I put together with Org-mode for a short C++ seminar [1]. All the code is executable while editing the document in Org, which is nice for a number of reasons. I also added some custom CSS/JS for the HTML export. [1]: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/notmatthancock/acm-computing-seminar/blob/master/resources/langs/cpp/index.html https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/notmatthan...
- justinmk 10y ago
  > Any comments regarding the potential for inline code execution? Try codi.vim for REPL-like eval: https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim
hydandata 10y ago
If this really were like Spacemacs it would ship with Emacs keybindings.
tdjackey 10y ago
aha
gravypod 10y ago
All these "distrobutions" are going to do is further fragment the already extremely confusing terminal-text-editor world. There are so many configurations that it's never going to make sense to me. If it was simple, there'd be an answer to this question: how do I setup Vim/Emacs as a fully feature complete IDE for C, C++, Rust, Go, Java, JavaScript (Node or Web), C#? By feature complete I mean autocomplete, error detection, built in one-button-runs, automatic config/sane defaults. Keep in mind this is a dream list. It's perfectly fine if the list only includes 2-4 of these languages but it needs to have all of these features. Looking at this from the outside (people who use IDEs) in (onto the people who use Vim/Emacs) we have maybe 1 IDE/Language and that's confusing for us. I can't imaginge having 3 text editors all of which have different common dotfiles.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  This is generally what roadblocks me when I try to pick up vim. The part I hate about atom is reaching for my mouse. But I like that I didn't have to sacrifice my firstborn to get a sane setup for three langauege simultaneously.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I've been using ~5 IDEs for the better part of two years now. I tried to hold my leaning-tower of Eclipse together but that didn't end well. I love Eclipse because it has all of the features I need that many other IDEs don't have yet but at the same time it has one of the worst and least intuative plugin systems (funny how that works out, right?). There's no hope for polyglots I think because nothing will ever be developed for us. Companies are usually Java, Scala, Python, JS shops and there isn't much a need for mutli-language tooling but sadly that's what most of what I need.
    - schnable 10y ago
      IntelliJ is awesome for polyglot development.
      - 10y ago
perlpimp 10y ago
I am kinda confused since https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim also exists out there.
- tom_mellior 10y ago
  That's a fork of https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim
Royalaid 10y ago
This is awesome! For someone coming into the more "conventional" editor space scouring github/internet for plugins is a huge pain and its even harder to find ones that cover your cases and are kept up to date. Having this all rolled into one as and having it all work together in harmony is a big win for on boarding people to vim! Disclaimer: I haven't tried this package but it does seem to have a lot of promise.
timothylaurent 10y ago
spacevim.org is getting blocked by my work's OpenDNS due to a 'security threat'. I wonder why?
- wsdjeg 10y ago
  https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim
desireco42 10y ago
This is awesome, if there was one thing I saw in Emacs that I loved it, and no, it is not the famous OrgMode, it is this! Thank you. For those who don't know what it is, it is showing possible keystrokes you can hit, which is super helpful when I was using new plugins and such.
unk 10y ago
looks like a forked version of https://github.com/rafi/vim-config https://github.com/rafi/vim-config. I'd say the inspiration is mostly from this and not Spacemacs.
- justRafi 10y ago
  yep. it's a fork from several months ago. too bad he didn't use the button.
wsdjeg 10y ago
Thanks for all of your feedbacks.

223 points by wsdjeg 10y ago

… and people wonder why I dislike Markdown. (There are fairly radical rendering differences between the GitHub page and the spacevim.org page, because different Markdown renderers with different bugs have been used, and the Markdown was fairly sloppily written.)

ticoombs 10y ago
Is there a linter yet for markdown?
- mrmondo 10y ago
  There's quite a few (outside of vim), such as https://github.com/mivok/markdownlint https://github.com/mivok/markdownlint and https://github.com/SublimeText-Markdown/MarkdownEditing https://github.com/SublimeText-Markdown/MarkdownEditing
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
scrollaway 10y ago
It looks like whatever Github pages is using as renderer (kramdown iirc?) does not support postfix links like [dein.vim] here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim/dev/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim/dev/READ... The table rendering issues I suspect are from the lack of a newline after the headers. I don't know whether it's correct or not because, yknow, markdown. Still better than rst. :)
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  reStructuredText is at least consistent. And extensible. And secure. It has a decent spec, as well. It’s just a pity that it never gained widespread acceptance or other implementations and is thus effectively tied to Python. I like reStructuredText and work in it regularly. I’m sad that Markdown with all its terrible inconsistency, lack of extensibility, insecurity, &c. has prevailed.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    The reasons why Markdown is popular are I think very similar to why HTML is popular. In its first years, it was loosely specced, very liberal in what it accepted and was parsed differently by different implementations (browsers). When this actually became a real problem, HTML5 came out to spec it much more rigorously. RST in that picture is XHTML. Rigorous spec, but very picky with the input. Typo? Your whole document won't render. I've been bitten by XHTML and I've been bitten by RST. The experiences are very similar. I agree with the need for a more rigorous spec but like with HTML it still needs to be liberal with its input. So that's what we need, and I just hope it doesn't take years to come into existence. An HTML5 for markdown. And we shall call it MD5!
ageofwant 10y ago
Yes I recognized the markdown fails from my own markdown fails. Especially when you move repos between github and bitbucket, and expect README.md to 'just work', it seldom does. I've gone between md, org and even rst. They are all great, but still suck in curious ways. pandoc helps but it is a whole kettle of fermented fish in itself.
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  One big hint: leave blank lines between block elements. (It’s the same in reStructuredText, except that it actually complains if you do it incorrectly rather than being silently inconsistent as all Markdown implementations that I know of are.) Not doing that is the main thing that’s wreaking havoc here.

johncoltrane 10y ago

No. Spacevim makes vim works _differently_.

allover 10y ago
To be fair that's the submitter's title, it's not from the SpaceVim site.
- auscompgeek 10y ago
  The submitter is also the author of SpaceVim. Perhaps this should be a "Show HN" instead?

mavdi 10y ago

Can't get it to work properly, it seems to be very buggy currently or cerain instructions are missing.

krzyk 10y ago

Ok, but what it is? The page doesn't explain it. The top page explanation refers to spacemacs and most vim users don't know spacemacs. Is it a vim plus a bundle of plugins? EDIT: Cleaned up the spacemacs sentence.

Shicholas 10y ago
it's emacs with vim controls. FWIW, I wouldn't compare emacs with vim in this set up, but with something like tumx instead (and imo what emacs offers is better than tmux).
- TheDong 10y ago
  They're not asking what space-emacs is, but what this linked page is. This page is not emacs. This page is just a bunch of neovim plugins, as OP surmised.
- bn-usd-mistake 10y ago
  No it's not. This is actually vim, just with some configuration and plugins. You are probably talking about [Spacemacs](http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/)?
arnarbi 10y ago
It's a distribution, bundling vim with a whole bunch of plugins and configuration that's supposed to work out of the box. Spacemacs is the same for Emacs.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  Thanks, that's the tldr I was looking for too.
- jasonm23 10y ago
  I wish people stopped calling a shared config a 'distribution' In both Spacemacs and Spacevim, all that's being provided is a config. No runtime, no package manager, no changes to the actual binaries of either app. It's hyperbole.

madmax108 10y ago

The greatest dev timesaving tip that someone gave me was to clear my .vimrc and start off with a blank slate. vim is a language in itself [1] and it's easy to try to mimic someone who has conversational fluency in it, but as with languages, the only way to learn in practice from the start. Projects like SpaceVim try to create an IDE like environment, but because of being terminal driven, it's difficult for anyone to "discover" features. You end up with a large distribution with barely used features. Instead by growing and maintaining your own vimrc, you get something that can be both used everywhere (dotfiles and Github FTW) and work FOR you. At the end of the day, vim is JUST another tool to make you work more efficiently. Trust me. "truncate -s 0 ~/.vimrc" and take the time to learn. You won't regret it in the long run. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10315645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10315645

shmerl 10y ago
truncate -s 0 ~/.vimrc Shorter way: > ~/.vimrc
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Not really shorter as I have to Ctrl+C to get back to shell afterwards. Anyways my zsh has noclobber set so your command fails with error: zsh: file exists: ~/.vimrc
  - stplsd 10y ago
    > ~/.vimrc works on bash, but it hangs on zsh because it treats it like cat > ~/.vimrc (> without any command in front of it is not well defined in POSIX) So portable way to do this is like this: :> ~/.vimrc
- stplsd 10y ago
  Or to be completely portable :> ~/.vimrc
- dotancohen 10y ago
  Smarter way: $ mv ~/.vimrc ~/vimrc-reference

caconym_ 10y ago

I started using Spacemacs recently for its out-of-the-box IDE-like features but the layers' functionality seems to be fairly hit-or-miss and overall the impression is one of a bug-infested nightmare. Every time I try to set up my environment on a new machine, I get some new set of problems that I have no idea how to solve (disappearing powerline, broken neotree, weird projectile caching behavior totally breaking my workflow, busted syntax checking, and more). I don't blame the Spacemacs folks for this; I actually think what they've done is really cool. Emacs simply is what it is, I think. I don't have time nor inclination to learn elisp and build/fix my own environment. When it does work, it's great. But the inconsistency is probably going to drive me away, back to Vim. I think that if anyone can build a similar thing for Vim that actually works, I'll use it in a heartbeat.

michaelmrose 10y ago
I have the exact opposite experience with vanilla Emacs. It works consistently without issue. Regarding plugins you can use melpa and track the latest release of everything at all times. You can use melpa and update most stuff infrequently save for the ones that are most important to you. You can use melpa stable and run only stable versions of everything. You can use melpa stable and run newer versions of a minority of plugins that are important to you. What plugins you choose to use and and whether you choose stable or unstable could very well lead to vastly different experiences. The best strategy is to carefully select plugins which are useful to you and high quality, and run the stable versions of most things updating your tools infrequently when a new major release adds something that looks useful to you.
hxegon 10y ago
I had the same experience with spacemacs, but it made me realize what I was missing with vim. Currently trying to build up an emacs/evil config from scratch.
brudgers 10y ago
That's a general problem with many 'frameworks'. When something goes off the happy path, the abstraction is gone and the user is dealing with the underlying abstractions. Elisp for Spacemacs; JavaScript for the hotness of the month, and X11 for Ubuntu. I don't think it's really possible to build something like Spacemacs for Vim because of the different underlying architectural decisions. Vim is a one-thing-only-and-do-it-well tool. Emacs is 'an operating system missing a decent text edtior'.

shmerl 10y ago

I'm using neovim as is. Is it a wrapper around it?

Gaelan 10y ago
It's essentially a premade vimrc (.nvim/config) and set of packages.

towb 10y ago

Yay for the effort! But personally I don't think this is a good way to learn and use vim. The strength of vim is to customise it after your own needs and you'll do yourself a disservice if you end up with a config that you don't know and don't use more than x percent of.

scribu 10y ago
I agree, the usefulness of a "distribution" like this is getting some fresh ideas about how to customise the editor. For example, this site listed some useful plugins that I didn't know about, such as https://github.com/bogado/file-line https://github.com/bogado/file-line
- thatmiddleway 10y ago
  Yea, this is always the big value for me from these distributions. I can always find a cool plugin or bit of vimscript that I didn't know about.

xkxx 10y ago

Oh, yeah! Good old curl | sh via HTTP. Fucking awesome. I wonder how many people get unknowingly pwned while executing such curl | sh instructions. It's not hard at all to MitM HTTP, detect if shellcode is being transmitted, then add your own instructions to it. Or you can just compile a list of known sources that encourage to execute curl | sh and MitM only them if you want to make your exploits even more discreet. What a nice way to get yourself your own little botnet. Way to go! There's a catch though. You need access to infrastructure of ISP. But is it that hard to get such access? No.

scrollaway 10y ago
curl sh is no more dangerous than running any script you haven't read, or binary you haven't decompiled for that matter. The odds of mitm are exactly the same.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  No, installing a package using my package manager will a) ensure this exact binary/script is GPG signed by someone I ostensibly trust b) ensure it's not been tampered with by a MitM between the hosting server and my computer This reduces my risk exposure to "creator of software X (or distro packager Y) has turned rogue", which is many orders of magnitude less likely than "website of software X got pwned, or someone is MitM-ing me".
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    That does not invalidate what I said.
    - bigbugbag 10y ago
      It absolutely does. You trust the distro maintainer and have a security mechanism to ensure the scripts and binaries have not been tampered with. So virtually no risk of MitM and very little risk of malicious scripts and binaries. Reading script and decompiling binaries does not imply you understand every thing they do, but it does imply that you have an unlimited amount of time which is impractical at best.

Shicholas 10y ago

just wanted to say thanks to the people who maintain this. I love spacemacs! first editor I picked up where the defaults get me >95% of what I want.

slax0r 10y ago

FYI, if your ~/.vim dir is a symlink, the install script will fail to properly symlink ~/.SpaceVim to ~/.vim

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

> Like spacemacs, but for vim. This is one of the most obtuse project descriptions I've seen. If you're making a...whatever this is...aimed at Vim users, why would you expect them to be familiar with a something-or-other for Emacs?

verandaguy 10y ago
Not to mention that (IIRC) Spacemacs involves installing evil-mode, which makes Emacs interactions similar to Vim interactions. Taking that into account, this can be interpreted as "It makes Vim work more like Vim."
- AtticHacker 10y ago
  Or it could be interpreted as "Make Vim use Emacs keys!"
- eyko 10y ago
  The main difference is that in Spacemacs, you hit the space bar and you get suggestions of commands to use, then you can narrow those down by navigating those groups. For example, if you want search your project for a file, you would hit the space bar then type "p" (for project). At that point a number of choices appears, e.g. "f" (IIRC) is to find files in your project. After a while it becomes sort of second nature: SPC f s - file save SPC m t f - mode test file (e.g. if you're in a go file it'd know how to run tests for go files). Another nice thing is that `SPC ?` brings up a prompt that lets you search for commands: you type a keyword for example and you get all the editor commands that match your keyword, so it's easy to navigate your editor shortcuts. That was useful for me, since every result came with the "spacemacs" shortcut, and the Emacs shortcut, so I ended up learning Emacs for free (I was coming from Vim). Note: I've also tried Spacevim and the only thing it has in common with Spacemacs is the mnemonic key bindings. It doesn't seem to be discoverable (at least not with SPC ?) and it also doesn't seem to be consistent (I couldn't "guess" what certain things were, in spacemacs it's consistent enough that you can guess). Those are the main core pillars imho: http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#core-pillars http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#core-pillars

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xkxx 10y ago

I think scrollaway is here to troll. No need to reply to him seriously. You may reply to him in a humorous manner or just scroll away from his comments, just like his nick recommends us to do.

dang 10y ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. You've already broken HN's civility rules more than once. Please (re)-read the following and stop doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316485 and marked it off-topic.

Philipp__ 10y ago

I don't get Spacemacs hype. I tried it, and never felt comfortable using it. Started with blank .emacs.d, yeah I completely cleard whole configuration two or three times until I hit sweetspot. Now I'm sitting on ~250 loc config on vanilla emacs (including evil), and eveything works like a charm. Plus I learned a lot about elisp. I never liked those bundles and distributions. They always felt redundant, but I can understand the appeal to some people.

the_duke 10y ago
I would probably spend more than 100 hours until I got to a point of equivalence with SpaceMacs, starting from a plain emacs. Especially since I use quite a few different languages. Ain't nobody got time for that...
- tom_mellior 10y ago
  The OP's point was not "equivalence", it was a "sweet spot". Even with "quite a few different languages", if the standard Emacs modes are close enough to the sweet spot, you don't need Spacemacs.
  - the_duke 10y ago
    It's a matter of preference and dedication. Some love bringing their emacs/vim setup to their own perfection and spend a lot of time on it. Other are too lazy for that and are fine with a preconfigured setup like SpaceMacs. Whatever you prefer. My point just was, for someone like me, SpaceMacs is a truly awesome project.
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  The point is how much of Spacemacs you end up using?! And in which languages you work? Because, what consumes your time is not setup, with use-package setup becomes trivial really, what sucks you in is learning the plugins and how they work (cider, ensime, alchemist, magit, merlin, those are serious environments not just syntax/autocomplete plugins). Idk if they come with spacemacs, I doubt it, but what then makes the difference if they come with Spacemacs or not, since most of the time you will spent on learning them, and not setting them up. Spacemacs is so customized that it is like learning new editor from ground up, at least for me. Last year I spent solely using and learning Emacs, to the point where every command and keybinds made sense, before that I used Vim for years. After one year of training I decided to install EVIL, and now I am enjoying Emacs and Vim a lot. Yesterday I downloaded spacemacs, opened it and I was like, ugh, wtf now?! I just go overwhelmed by the amount of preexisting code which I did not understand, and needed to crash a lot of hours to get everything from ground zero.

drKarl 10y ago

This uses NeoVim, for a similar bundle using Vim there's some options like Steve Francia's https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim (called Ultimate Vim Distribution)

fao_ 10y ago

What exactly is a "premium colourscheme"?

justRafi 10y ago
when I coined it, I was thinking about color-schemes that are aesthetic and well maintained.

hollander 10y ago

The install guide: vim sh mv ~/.vimrc ~/.vimrc_bak mv ~/.vim ~/.vim_bak git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.vim nvim sh git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.config/nvim Why do people always expect the average joe user to understand this? What do I do with this? Do I run this in the terminal? Then what? First line opens Vim and it opens 11 files. Now what? This seems like the average explanation that works for the person who writes it, but is useless unless you know this already.

ageofwant 10y ago
for vim do: sh mv ~/.vimrc ~/.vimrc_bak mv ~/.vim ~/.vim_bak git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.vim for nvim do: sh git clone https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim.git ~/.config/nvim I'm guessing markdown fail.
yrro 10y ago
Particularly annoying given that Vim 8 (finally!) has a perfectly fine packaging system.
letientai299 10y ago
Check their github page, there's a (or 2) different install instruction(s).

leblancfg 10y ago

Tried Spacemacs 3-4 times because of org mode. Most specifically inline code block execution, through org-babel. Still not ready to change over from vim, though. What I haven't done is check neovim. Any comments regarding the potential for inline code execution?

chestervonwinch 10y ago
Org-mode comes standard with plain emacs (no need for all the extra bells and whistles that come with spacemacs, necessarily). Since you're a vim user, try installing evil as a first plugin, and only adding additional ones as you see fit. I found that spacemacs did too much and preferred vanilla emacs + evil + a few python plugins. Still, I mostly use vim for smaller scripts. Emacs is better as an IDE in my opinion. In my experience, you really can't beat Org-mode when it comes to inline code execution. You can preview LaTex and plotting inline as well. Plus, you can of course export the document into a variety of formats (HTML, PDF, etc.), which are quite customizable thereafter. Here is a document I put together with Org-mode for a short C++ seminar [1]. All the code is executable while editing the document in Org, which is nice for a number of reasons. I also added some custom CSS/JS for the HTML export. [1]: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/notmatthancock/acm-computing-seminar/blob/master/resources/langs/cpp/index.html https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/notmatthan...
justinmk 10y ago
> Any comments regarding the potential for inline code execution? Try codi.vim for REPL-like eval: https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim

hydandata 10y ago

If this really were like Spacemacs it would ship with Emacs keybindings.

tdjackey 10y ago

aha

gravypod 10y ago

All these "distrobutions" are going to do is further fragment the already extremely confusing terminal-text-editor world. There are so many configurations that it's never going to make sense to me. If it was simple, there'd be an answer to this question: how do I setup Vim/Emacs as a fully feature complete IDE for C, C++, Rust, Go, Java, JavaScript (Node or Web), C#? By feature complete I mean autocomplete, error detection, built in one-button-runs, automatic config/sane defaults. Keep in mind this is a dream list. It's perfectly fine if the list only includes 2-4 of these languages but it needs to have all of these features. Looking at this from the outside (people who use IDEs) in (onto the people who use Vim/Emacs) we have maybe 1 IDE/Language and that's confusing for us. I can't imaginge having 3 text editors all of which have different common dotfiles.

Waterluvian 10y ago
This is generally what roadblocks me when I try to pick up vim. The part I hate about atom is reaching for my mouse. But I like that I didn't have to sacrifice my firstborn to get a sane setup for three langauege simultaneously.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I've been using ~5 IDEs for the better part of two years now. I tried to hold my leaning-tower of Eclipse together but that didn't end well. I love Eclipse because it has all of the features I need that many other IDEs don't have yet but at the same time it has one of the worst and least intuative plugin systems (funny how that works out, right?). There's no hope for polyglots I think because nothing will ever be developed for us. Companies are usually Java, Scala, Python, JS shops and there isn't much a need for mutli-language tooling but sadly that's what most of what I need.
  - schnable 10y ago
    IntelliJ is awesome for polyglot development.
    - 10y ago

perlpimp 10y ago

I am kinda confused since https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim also exists out there.

tom_mellior 10y ago
That's a fork of https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim

Royalaid 10y ago

This is awesome! For someone coming into the more "conventional" editor space scouring github/internet for plugins is a huge pain and its even harder to find ones that cover your cases and are kept up to date. Having this all rolled into one as and having it all work together in harmony is a big win for on boarding people to vim! Disclaimer: I haven't tried this package but it does seem to have a lot of promise.

timothylaurent 10y ago

spacevim.org is getting blocked by my work's OpenDNS due to a 'security threat'. I wonder why?

wsdjeg 10y ago
https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim

desireco42 10y ago

This is awesome, if there was one thing I saw in Emacs that I loved it, and no, it is not the famous OrgMode, it is this! Thank you. For those who don't know what it is, it is showing possible keystrokes you can hit, which is super helpful when I was using new plugins and such.

unk 10y ago

looks like a forked version of https://github.com/rafi/vim-config https://github.com/rafi/vim-config. I'd say the inspiration is mostly from this and not Spacemacs.

justRafi 10y ago
yep. it's a fork from several months ago. too bad he didn't use the button.

wsdjeg 10y ago

Thanks for all of your feedbacks.