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I had to go to Spacemacs[1] for a few reasons: - Using the spacebar to invoke functionality is a massive physical boon to usage. Stock emacs wrecks me from fin

I had to go to Spacemacs[1] for a few reasons: - Using the spacebar to invoke functionality is a massive physical boon to usage. Stock emacs wrecks me from fingers to neck for an real amounts of usage. This is a purely subjective weakness. - Spacemacs vi emulation. I drank the modal Kook-aid. Especially if one has to SSH into headless instances in the cloud. vi is part of the POSIX standard, so you know it's there and it's robust. - Spacemacs engineering. Great package integration in the form of layers. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/

kalium_xyz 7y ago
You can also just run evil mode for the vi emulation (its what spacemacs does), spacemacs is the best emacs IDE though IMHO.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  you definitely can use evil mode but you will find a lot of edge cases where you have to configure something in some modes to behave sanely whereas with spacemacs they have usually done all that legwork of anything you want to use.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    You can get a lot of help with evil-collection https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection Which provides evil bindings for a lot of modes
  - kalium_xyz 7y ago
    You also have doom which is just evil and not space centric AFAIK
    - smitty1e 7y ago
      Doom has good reviews AFAICT
      - shanavasm 7y ago
        I switched to doom from spacemacs and quite happy with it. Lot more easier to tweak that spacemacs.
    - weaksauce 7y ago
      i'm a large fan of space as a leader key even coming from vim so spacemacs felt like a natural extension. but yeah doom works for many people
- banachtarski 7y ago
  My experience with Spacemacs was the complete opposite. There's a ton of inconsistency with the quality of the provided layers which is why YMMV when using it. The C++ layers up till last year was an utter disaster and I don't know if it's been fixed since. The WORST thing about spacemacs though is their absolutely broken release process. The master branch rarely upgrades with fixes applied to the develop branch, and the tacit recommendation is just to run "on the bleeding edge." I have no idea why spacemacs users tolerate this, but my productivity has since improved after ditching it.
  - mijoharas 7y ago
    I run the develop branch and I can't really remember any significant bugs I've had. I can kinda agree the C++ layer was definitely a bit of a pain, but I had general pain setting up a good workflow for C++ in emacs with the project I was working on (most of the emacs packages assumed a different layout, so couldn't understand my CMakeLists to generate the files it would need to look at for smart completion). Overall, I quite like spacemacs, I used to hack on it a bit to make it suit my needs better, but now I rarely have anything I need to do it "just works" now. I particularly appreciate that almost any language I want to use, I can just download a layer (I think it often prompts you to install one when you open the file automatically!) and a lot of the common across languages editor functions you want have similar keybindings, and the `which-key` popup will tell you anything you're missing. It makes a very short ramp up to being productive in your editor for a new language.
    - banachtarski 7y ago
      I'll be honest, my experience since has been that VSCode is... just better? I've been using vim/emacs for over 20 years now so it's a tough pill to swallow, but after trying out VSCode, I have to say that making it easy to program extensions with async functionality from the get-go was the right way to go. I think no combination of rtags, cquery, clangd, lsp, etc in Emacs/Vim/Neovim can approach the performance and quality of VSCode's C++ dev experience. And I say that having honestly tried every permutation of the above for many hours across many weeks.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Is there a way to make Spacemacs more performant? It felt slower than an IDE.
- mkesper 7y ago
  Use its client-server capabilities (http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_server http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_server). Most slowness I felt was startup time (except on Windows, there everything felt slooow).
alexeiz 7y ago
I considered Spacemacs, because I used Vim extensively in the past (and still use it for some tasks), but I felt that Vim emulation in Emacs would only hinder my understanding of Emacs and steepen the learning curve. So I ended up incorporating useful bits and pieces from Spacemacs into my .emacs config, but stayed with native Emacs key bindings. I'm comfortable with my choice, but please change my mind if you feel like it.

kalium_xyz 7y ago

You can also just run evil mode for the vi emulation (its what spacemacs does), spacemacs is the best emacs IDE though IMHO.

weaksauce 7y ago
you definitely can use evil mode but you will find a lot of edge cases where you have to configure something in some modes to behave sanely whereas with spacemacs they have usually done all that legwork of anything you want to use.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You can get a lot of help with evil-collection https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection Which provides evil bindings for a lot of modes
- kalium_xyz 7y ago
  You also have doom which is just evil and not space centric AFAIK
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    Doom has good reviews AFAICT
    - shanavasm 7y ago
      I switched to doom from spacemacs and quite happy with it. Lot more easier to tweak that spacemacs.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    i'm a large fan of space as a leader key even coming from vim so spacemacs felt like a natural extension. but yeah doom works for many people
banachtarski 7y ago
My experience with Spacemacs was the complete opposite. There's a ton of inconsistency with the quality of the provided layers which is why YMMV when using it. The C++ layers up till last year was an utter disaster and I don't know if it's been fixed since. The WORST thing about spacemacs though is their absolutely broken release process. The master branch rarely upgrades with fixes applied to the develop branch, and the tacit recommendation is just to run "on the bleeding edge." I have no idea why spacemacs users tolerate this, but my productivity has since improved after ditching it.
- mijoharas 7y ago
  I run the develop branch and I can't really remember any significant bugs I've had. I can kinda agree the C++ layer was definitely a bit of a pain, but I had general pain setting up a good workflow for C++ in emacs with the project I was working on (most of the emacs packages assumed a different layout, so couldn't understand my CMakeLists to generate the files it would need to look at for smart completion). Overall, I quite like spacemacs, I used to hack on it a bit to make it suit my needs better, but now I rarely have anything I need to do it "just works" now. I particularly appreciate that almost any language I want to use, I can just download a layer (I think it often prompts you to install one when you open the file automatically!) and a lot of the common across languages editor functions you want have similar keybindings, and the `which-key` popup will tell you anything you're missing. It makes a very short ramp up to being productive in your editor for a new language.
  - banachtarski 7y ago
    I'll be honest, my experience since has been that VSCode is... just better? I've been using vim/emacs for over 20 years now so it's a tough pill to swallow, but after trying out VSCode, I have to say that making it easy to program extensions with async functionality from the get-go was the right way to go. I think no combination of rtags, cquery, clangd, lsp, etc in Emacs/Vim/Neovim can approach the performance and quality of VSCode's C++ dev experience. And I say that having honestly tried every permutation of the above for many hours across many weeks.

29athrowaway 7y ago

Is there a way to make Spacemacs more performant? It felt slower than an IDE.

mkesper 7y ago
Use its client-server capabilities (http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_server http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_server). Most slowness I felt was startup time (except on Windows, there everything felt slooow).

alexeiz 7y ago

I considered Spacemacs, because I used Vim extensively in the past (and still use it for some tasks), but I felt that Vim emulation in Emacs would only hinder my understanding of Emacs and steepen the learning curve. So I ended up incorporating useful bits and pieces from Spacemacs into my .emacs config, but stayed with native Emacs key bindings. I'm comfortable with my choice, but please change my mind if you feel like it.