7 ms·

http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ with its org-mode and magit (https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/) integration, combined with the modal editing of vi

http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ with its org-mode and magit (https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/) integration, combined with the modal editing of vi, is truly superior. Don't care about your platform, desktop (I'm typically working over SSH in the cloud, so why bother?) or any of that hooplah. Just waiting for everybody else to catch up.

dragonsh 7y ago
Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking, so I use my own custom configuration. It's just lisp at the end of the day. Also for people who prefer emacs keys instead of vi, they can start with emacs-prelude package. But it will be hard to beat custom configuration in long run.
- Phenix88be 7y ago
  > Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking I have see this many times and never understood how startup time could be an issue. I startup Spacemacs at the beginning of the day, and close it when I leave. 10 second of startup time is nothing.
  - fookitty 7y ago
    10 seconds of startup time 10 years ago was nothing.
    - guenthert 7y ago
      The day had 86400s then as now.
  - uncletaco 7y ago
    I wonder if part of it is some people hacking emacs and going through a update-save-restart cycle instead of just evaluating their change in place. Then again it may be the case that part of the cycle is seeing if the package management system of your custom distro (be it spacemacs, doom, or whatever) picks up and configures the new packages correctly.
  - davepeck 7y ago
    I've noticed a divide between the workflows of emacs and vim users and I think it ties directly back to startup times. I'm an emacs user and, like you, I start it up once and keep it running indefinitely. Vim users tend to enter and exit the editor repeatedly during the day, typically alternating with their shell of choice.
    - opan 7y ago
      I would say this is largely true in practice, although when I found out that vim could have multiple buffers, windows, tabs, and that you could save session files, I suddenly was keeping vim open for many hours and opening new files in my existing instance. I would say a lot of people learn vim in a hurry and don't go far beyond the basics.
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    I never close Emacs unless I am shutting down the machine and that happens, perhaps once every month or two.
  - ObscureScience 7y ago
    It's kind of a sign of inefficiency as, at least as far as you can tell, a similar task was done in 1/10th of the time on a 1/1000th as powerful system. This may not be true, but just as you can't get to know every person you interract with you need to use plausible correlations to make judgements and predictions.
- kldsksdkl 7y ago
  You can also have emacs run as a daemon(1). That way you never have to wait. 1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Emacs#As_a_daemon https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Emacs#As_a_daemon
  - jjrh 7y ago
    This is the /real/ killer feature for me that I would find very difficult to live without and I don't know of any other editors that offer this functionality. Being able to remotely open my editor (either from a terminal, or with X11 forwarding) with all the files I have open, exactly where I left off is incredibly useful.
    - momentoftop 7y ago
      I never really learned screen because daemonised emacs sufficed for me. My daemon uptimes are normally the same as my system uptimes, with the one on my VPS currently at 77 days. A few years ago, I started using one daemon per project with server-use-tcp, each with a slightly different theme so I can easily tell them apart. (posted from emacs-w3m)
      - jjrh 7y ago
        using emacsclient in screen or tmux is kinda handy if you're using a flaky connection and keep disconnecting (like on a train)
    - h1d 7y ago
      Any benefit over using screen/tmux?
      - jjrh 7y ago
        Main benefit is you don't need to remember to start your editor frame in screen/tmux and you can use both terminal and gui/x11. So when I'm at work I start emacs in X11 windows, when remote I simply ssh in and do emacsclient and connect to all the buffers I have open (if I have low latency i'll do x11 forwarding and start x11 emacsclient ) It's basically the same as tmux/screen but gives you a lot more flexibility. Other big benefit is starting emacsclient is basically instant, so opening a file from a webbrowser or whatever is super fast (some folks have 30 second or longer emacs startup times). Only real downside is it really sucks bringing back your state when emacs crashes and you have hundreds of buffers open for multiple projects across 20-30 emacs clients.
rudedogg 7y ago
Also check out https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs. It has a faster start up time, and is updated regularly (everyone uses the develop branch).
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Oh yes I saw it forgot to mention though.
OhSoHumble 7y ago
I have been using Spacemacs exclusively for around three or four years and I don't know if I can actively recommend it. The problem is that the 'stable/master' branch of Spacemacs is incredibly outdated. I found myself needing fixes or improvements that existed in 'develop' so often that I migrated over to that branch. The idea of regularly cutting stable releases just isn't done within that project so if I'm recommending Spacemacs to new users I have to give them installation instructions that aren't provided by the documentation. Also, to get more up to date documentation I need to go to the layers docs in the GitHub repo and that can be hard to track down. Every fresh install I've setup there has just been... so many problems with melpa and pulling down packages. Most of the time I have to repeatedly delete the package cache and restart Emacs until Spacemacs successfully pulls down packages - usually using the insecure flag so that packages aren't downloaded over HTTPS. It's just... not as a polished as installing VSCode and a bunch of extensions. Spacemacs can require a lot of work and patience and I've just had too many things break with it over time.
- wikibob 7y ago
  What do you suggest instead? Is there a nice how-to for setting up emacs with evil mode and a reasonable set of defaults that don’t require endless tweaking?
  - honkycat 7y ago
    Doom emacs is great and way faster. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
  - ravar 7y ago
    set capslock to ctrl and don't use any modal stuff. Also I use avy, bound to C-j, for navigation within the buffer.
  - OhSoHumble 7y ago
    I don't really have a suggestion, to be honest. I've only used Emacs within the context of Spacemacs and don't know of a better alternative. Maybe sometime later in my life I'll look at what Emacs looks like without Spacemacs. I've been putting that off because I haven't really learned elisp and I don't know if it's actually possible to have a more flushed out and polished emacs experience without being an elisp master.

dragonsh 7y ago

Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking, so I use my own custom configuration. It's just lisp at the end of the day. Also for people who prefer emacs keys instead of vi, they can start with emacs-prelude package. But it will be hard to beat custom configuration in long run.

Phenix88be 7y ago
> Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking I have see this many times and never understood how startup time could be an issue. I startup Spacemacs at the beginning of the day, and close it when I leave. 10 second of startup time is nothing.
- fookitty 7y ago
  10 seconds of startup time 10 years ago was nothing.
  - guenthert 7y ago
    The day had 86400s then as now.
- uncletaco 7y ago
  I wonder if part of it is some people hacking emacs and going through a update-save-restart cycle instead of just evaluating their change in place. Then again it may be the case that part of the cycle is seeing if the package management system of your custom distro (be it spacemacs, doom, or whatever) picks up and configures the new packages correctly.
- davepeck 7y ago
  I've noticed a divide between the workflows of emacs and vim users and I think it ties directly back to startup times. I'm an emacs user and, like you, I start it up once and keep it running indefinitely. Vim users tend to enter and exit the editor repeatedly during the day, typically alternating with their shell of choice.
  - opan 7y ago
    I would say this is largely true in practice, although when I found out that vim could have multiple buffers, windows, tabs, and that you could save session files, I suddenly was keeping vim open for many hours and opening new files in my existing instance. I would say a lot of people learn vim in a hurry and don't go far beyond the basics.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  I never close Emacs unless I am shutting down the machine and that happens, perhaps once every month or two.
- ObscureScience 7y ago
  It's kind of a sign of inefficiency as, at least as far as you can tell, a similar task was done in 1/10th of the time on a 1/1000th as powerful system. This may not be true, but just as you can't get to know every person you interract with you need to use plausible correlations to make judgements and predictions.
kldsksdkl 7y ago
You can also have emacs run as a daemon(1). That way you never have to wait. 1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Emacs#As_a_daemon https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Emacs#As_a_daemon
- jjrh 7y ago
  This is the /real/ killer feature for me that I would find very difficult to live without and I don't know of any other editors that offer this functionality. Being able to remotely open my editor (either from a terminal, or with X11 forwarding) with all the files I have open, exactly where I left off is incredibly useful.
  - momentoftop 7y ago
    I never really learned screen because daemonised emacs sufficed for me. My daemon uptimes are normally the same as my system uptimes, with the one on my VPS currently at 77 days. A few years ago, I started using one daemon per project with server-use-tcp, each with a slightly different theme so I can easily tell them apart. (posted from emacs-w3m)
    - jjrh 7y ago
      using emacsclient in screen or tmux is kinda handy if you're using a flaky connection and keep disconnecting (like on a train)
  - h1d 7y ago
    Any benefit over using screen/tmux?
    - jjrh 7y ago
      Main benefit is you don't need to remember to start your editor frame in screen/tmux and you can use both terminal and gui/x11. So when I'm at work I start emacs in X11 windows, when remote I simply ssh in and do emacsclient and connect to all the buffers I have open (if I have low latency i'll do x11 forwarding and start x11 emacsclient ) It's basically the same as tmux/screen but gives you a lot more flexibility. Other big benefit is starting emacsclient is basically instant, so opening a file from a webbrowser or whatever is super fast (some folks have 30 second or longer emacs startup times). Only real downside is it really sucks bringing back your state when emacs crashes and you have hundreds of buffers open for multiple projects across 20-30 emacs clients.

rudedogg 7y ago

Also check out https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs. It has a faster start up time, and is updated regularly (everyone uses the develop branch).

dragonsh 7y ago
Oh yes I saw it forgot to mention though.

OhSoHumble 7y ago

I have been using Spacemacs exclusively for around three or four years and I don't know if I can actively recommend it. The problem is that the 'stable/master' branch of Spacemacs is incredibly outdated. I found myself needing fixes or improvements that existed in 'develop' so often that I migrated over to that branch. The idea of regularly cutting stable releases just isn't done within that project so if I'm recommending Spacemacs to new users I have to give them installation instructions that aren't provided by the documentation. Also, to get more up to date documentation I need to go to the layers docs in the GitHub repo and that can be hard to track down. Every fresh install I've setup there has just been... so many problems with melpa and pulling down packages. Most of the time I have to repeatedly delete the package cache and restart Emacs until Spacemacs successfully pulls down packages - usually using the insecure flag so that packages aren't downloaded over HTTPS. It's just... not as a polished as installing VSCode and a bunch of extensions. Spacemacs can require a lot of work and patience and I've just had too many things break with it over time.

wikibob 7y ago
What do you suggest instead? Is there a nice how-to for setting up emacs with evil mode and a reasonable set of defaults that don’t require endless tweaking?
- honkycat 7y ago
  Doom emacs is great and way faster. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
- ravar 7y ago
  set capslock to ctrl and don't use any modal stuff. Also I use avy, bound to C-j, for navigation within the buffer.
- OhSoHumble 7y ago
  I don't really have a suggestion, to be honest. I've only used Emacs within the context of Spacemacs and don't know of a better alternative. Maybe sometime later in my life I'll look at what Emacs looks like without Spacemacs. I've been putting that off because I haven't really learned elisp and I don't know if it's actually possible to have a more flushed out and polished emacs experience without being an elisp master.