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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'

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 The problem is that the 'stable/master' branch of Spacemacs is incredibly outdated.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.
- opan 7y ago
  I've been planning the move to vanilla emacs for a while now. Spacemacs is a good way to see what powerful tools are out there. I'm just gonna write down which packages I actually use regularly from Spacemacs and then start my config with those and see what's missing. It will probably be a stressful transition, so I'm putting it off for now. I will probably also take the chance to manage all my emacs packages with guix at that point, too.
opan 7y ago
I've had a similar, although not as extremely bad, experience to you. It does make the project look bad, but I've actually run into this issue with lots of stuff where "stable" is horrendous to use (Debian) and gives the whole project a bad name. I wouldn't mind recommending spacemacs to a friend around my age, but I guess the issue of having to be on develop is something that would make me hesitant to recommend it to my parents (something I've genuinely considered, by the way). I also frequently wonder how I'd introduce spacemacs to someone who hasn't used vim or emacs... I used vim for a very long time, so to me it's great that my knowledge carries over. I just don't know if it makes complete sense to say to someone "vim has better bindings than emacs, so even though this is emacs, you should learn these vim binds". Plus then they should probably still know at least the basics of emacs for screens where evil fails you, or for if they ever have to use emacs on another machine, or for when an emacs bind is better ("C-x h" seems better than ggVG to me).
- masukomi 7y ago
  as a vim user, I'd have to say no... don't recommend it to vim users. There have been, for me, too many edge cases where I just end up in that helm(?) display thing at the bottom when I was trying to do some simple thing. For ages :edit and :write and :quit didn't work. As the parent poster mentioned the installation doesn't work. You really have to be willing to work for it. I've commented about the incorrect docs and the need to tweak things to make it use insecure downloads and they seem content with the idea that there's a known workaround, that isn't mentioned in the docs. i really _want_ to use it. I love vim's modal editing, but extending vim is a pain in the butt, and I'd love to use lisp to tweak my editor. But, I absolutely can not recommend spacemacs right now. Installation process is broken crap (at least on the mac) and you end up having to deal with meta-this-that-the-other way too often for simple (non-advanced) vim commands.
  - opan 7y ago
    It sounds like you're avoiding some of the benefits that emacs brings. Helm was one of the biggest additions for me. I also love that every action is a function that can be called, and that you can make your own functions. I often hit `SPC SPC` and then run commands from helm. I've even used its fuzzy-finding search to find functions I wasn't sure existed. It's a real joy for me. I do use `:e` and `:w` pretty often, so I'm grateful those work. I suppose I would've felt very differently if I'd ran into issues with them early on. I don't actually use `:q` from spacemacs since with emacs you often leave open all your visited files. If I do want to get rid of something, I tend to do `SPC b d` for buffer delete. >installation doesn't work I think on my GNU/Linux machine the installation worked for me. I first started switching to the develop branch because of a bug in one of the layers I enabled that was fixed in develop. >insecure downloads I definitely haven't made this change that people are mentioning.

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.
opan 7y ago
I've been planning the move to vanilla emacs for a while now. Spacemacs is a good way to see what powerful tools are out there. I'm just gonna write down which packages I actually use regularly from Spacemacs and then start my config with those and see what's missing. It will probably be a stressful transition, so I'm putting it off for now. I will probably also take the chance to manage all my emacs packages with guix at that point, too.

opan 7y ago

I've had a similar, although not as extremely bad, experience to you. It does make the project look bad, but I've actually run into this issue with lots of stuff where "stable" is horrendous to use (Debian) and gives the whole project a bad name. I wouldn't mind recommending spacemacs to a friend around my age, but I guess the issue of having to be on develop is something that would make me hesitant to recommend it to my parents (something I've genuinely considered, by the way). I also frequently wonder how I'd introduce spacemacs to someone who hasn't used vim or emacs... I used vim for a very long time, so to me it's great that my knowledge carries over. I just don't know if it makes complete sense to say to someone "vim has better bindings than emacs, so even though this is emacs, you should learn these vim binds". Plus then they should probably still know at least the basics of emacs for screens where evil fails you, or for if they ever have to use emacs on another machine, or for when an emacs bind is better ("C-x h" seems better than ggVG to me).

masukomi 7y ago
as a vim user, I'd have to say no... don't recommend it to vim users. There have been, for me, too many edge cases where I just end up in that helm(?) display thing at the bottom when I was trying to do some simple thing. For ages :edit and :write and :quit didn't work. As the parent poster mentioned the installation doesn't work. You really have to be willing to work for it. I've commented about the incorrect docs and the need to tweak things to make it use insecure downloads and they seem content with the idea that there's a known workaround, that isn't mentioned in the docs. i really _want_ to use it. I love vim's modal editing, but extending vim is a pain in the butt, and I'd love to use lisp to tweak my editor. But, I absolutely can not recommend spacemacs right now. Installation process is broken crap (at least on the mac) and you end up having to deal with meta-this-that-the-other way too often for simple (non-advanced) vim commands.
- opan 7y ago
  It sounds like you're avoiding some of the benefits that emacs brings. Helm was one of the biggest additions for me. I also love that every action is a function that can be called, and that you can make your own functions. I often hit `SPC SPC` and then run commands from helm. I've even used its fuzzy-finding search to find functions I wasn't sure existed. It's a real joy for me. I do use `:e` and `:w` pretty often, so I'm grateful those work. I suppose I would've felt very differently if I'd ran into issues with them early on. I don't actually use `:q` from spacemacs since with emacs you often leave open all your visited files. If I do want to get rid of something, I tend to do `SPC b d` for buffer delete. >installation doesn't work I think on my GNU/Linux machine the installation worked for me. I first started switching to the develop branch because of a bug in one of the layers I enabled that was fixed in develop. >insecure downloads I definitely haven't made this change that people are mentioning.