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Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil

227 points by weavie 12y ago

samatman 12y ago
I like this development. I feel that we have three editors (really types thereof) for a reason. The Sublime/TM/Notepad++ crowd cares about OS-native integration. I use Sublime frequently because after a solid decade+ living in OSX land, my fingers know how what to do, and neither vim nor emacs respect that without considerable massaging. Vim fans want to use an elegant command syntax. I watch vim users code and always make a point to learn how to vim, eventually. The only reason I don't, is because I haven't. Emacs users want/need the programmable, extensible runtime. Emacs is a programming language; particularly in Lisp development, Emacs often contains programs that are basic/standard parts of the toolchain and not found in other editors. I use Emacs because I like it, but more importantly, because I have to. Combining the elegant syntax of Vim with the extensibility of Emacs, as well as some out-of-the-box support for the basic OS-native commands, is a very good start.
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Personally I enjoy any editor that doesn't get in my way, I really want to learn Emacs and / or Vim, but it's not exactly a downhill experience as say Notepad++, Atom, and other editors. I enjoy the idea of having all the Emacs or Vim super powers, but I can't seem to get used to it, I either use nano while on the terminal or just a full on IDE.
  - vonkow 12y ago
    Learning vim is like learning Kung Fu, you practice the same awkward route motions until they're so natural that you don't even notice you're doing them. Sadly, it's not a quick process, but it's worth it.
    - lottin 12y ago
      It's true. It made me develop an automatic reflex to hit the Esc key every time after inserting a couple of characters, even when I wasn't using vi at all. It was pretty annoying. Imagine typing a document in Word and pressing Esc constantly. Fortunately I switched to Emacs and the reflex went away.
      - MarcScott 12y ago
        But don't you find yourself hitting C-a to go to the beginning of a line and then insert a line break, then inadvertently deleting everything on the page. As an Emacs user, I do this all the time.
        sodifoiu 12y ago
        One nice thing about OSX is that some emacs movements work in most programs. C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-k, C-y (kill yank not quite the same) Edit: C-f and C-b too Edit 2: Just checked and word is not one of these programs :(
        sea6ear 12y ago
        Here's a link to add Emacs keybindings to Word on Mac OS X. Hopefully it's still accurate. http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-word/ http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-wor...
    - ThrustVectoring 12y ago
      It's faster than you'd think. I was far better with Vim than Textmate within a month of my switch.
  - integraton 12y ago
    Part of the foundation of understanding and appreciating text editors is understanding and appreciating the value of text, rather than trying to abstract it away under an IDE's several layers of GUI controls, widgets, and platform-specific APIs often designed by a single company that's trying to convince you to lock the future of your career and/or company to its platform. Furthermore, neither emacs nor vim are hard to learn. There's a widespread myth perpetuated both by novices and elitists that it's an all or nothing kind of thing. The reality is that even in vim you can use arrow keys and mouse/trackpad scrolling and ignore hjkl if you want. You could, for example, use terminal vim every single day and use only about 5.5 vim-specific commands: i, ctrl-c, :w, :q / :q!, and ZZ. With gvim or macvim, you could reduce that to two: i and ctrl-c.
- patejam 12y ago
  FWIW, I use Sublime/Jetbrain products for most of my programming and I always turn on vim keybindings. It isn't 100% the same as actual vim, but it is still faster than a mouse for me.
  - mmahemoff 12y ago
    I've never got into any of these Vi/Vim emulators because they vary from pure Vim in subtly unexpected ways and typically don't support plugins or vimrc setup. Neovim will change all that, being based on direct socket-based communication with actual Vim, so it really will be possible to get the best of both worlds.
  - expando 12y ago
    ideavim is easily the best vim emulation I had ever used until I tried spacemacs/evil. Ideavim blew the eclipse vim modes out of the water
    - colordrops 12y ago
      And they fixed some annoying inconsistencies with recent releases. It's pretty good now. Makes developing Java in an IDE tolerable.
- greggyb 12y ago
  I feel similarly to this. Emacs got extensibility down and probably would have destroyed Vi. Vim added Vimscript, but it is not what most would call elegant, nice, or any of the other things we want in a language. Adding extensibility is what kept Vim around. I like the design of Emacs, and I also like Lisps in general, but the Vim editing model is the best for me. It looks like Neovim is going to address many of the issues with Vim.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    As an emacs fan, I find vim model simple, abstract and efficient. Emacs default paradigm has amazing foundations but give fingercuts too often and lack composability while vim is quite self consistent (how ironic giving lisp essence). That said, growing your editing system by evaluation a small function is still a bliss. Go lisps. #repant
    - greggyb 12y ago
      That's a very good way to put it. Vim's editing model is much more functional (a la functional programming) than Emacs', whereas the latter's foundation is much more functional. I keep thinking I should try Emacs with one of the Vim-ulators, but I've got a pretty good flow going in Vim and I've got a lot of other things I'm trying to learn right now, not to mention paying work to do.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        Me too, since many people report emacs evil mode being pretty polished by now, I'm tempted to try a fresh emacs setup. There's also lispy.el, which is IIUC a paredit superset in vi-command-clothing.
        tuhdo 12y ago
        It's not for Vim anymore but can adapt to many editing styles.
        mikekchar 12y ago
- falcolas 12y ago
  Not to take away from the rest of your comment, but Macvim in insert mode works exactly like any other Mac text entry program. All of your regular keyboard shortcuts work as you expect them to, as does the mouse.
thorwavimwawa 12y ago
So.... who wants this? Vim users like vim as it is, warts and all. Emacs users already use emacs and typically don't want to learn vim.
- iand675 12y ago
  I'm using it with pretty good results so far. I had to stop using Emacs for a long time because I was developing a case of Emacs pinky, but I can appreciate that it does a lot more out of the box. After switching to Vim, I really came to appreciate its idioms too. Spacemacs lets me get the best of both worlds.
- adlpz 12y ago
  I want this. Well, in fact, I already use Emacs with Vim keybindings, so I don't need it, but I would have loved it some time ago. What I (and I believe most vim users) like about vim is not the software itself, but the concept and ideas behind it: the modal editing, the movement commands, the composability of them, etc. But the truth is that Emacs is, for lots of usages, better software. It's more extendable, has more features, it's even better written. So using Emacs with a vim-friendly UX seems like a great idea.
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  That's a bit of an overgeneralization. I'm a vim user, but am always willing to learn something that works better for me.
- tincholio 12y ago
  Just to provide a counter example... I've been a long-time (13 years or so) Emacs user, and some 3 or 4 years ago, I switched to modal editing using Evil. I find it simply simpler and more efficient than traditional Emacs bindings. I actually started using vim more often after that, too.
- hammerandtongs 12y ago
  Twenty five year Vi(m) user here. I switched to Evil and Emacs last year. The combination of Vim and Emacs is a much better Vim. org-mode is life changing. In general I've found that the plugins in the Emacs environment make more sense and simply work better then Vim equivalents.
_cipher_ 12y ago
When I saw this thread, the initial thought I had was "pff, another emacs thread about vim users". But this is absolutely perfect (either for transition, or for someone like me that just wants to try a transition but does not know where to start). Thanks for sharing. Beautiful work. :)
rhgraysonii 12y ago
So I installed it. I know nothing about emacs, have followed setup etc. It appears I definitely dont have Vi keybindings upon re-opening it after initial install. Anyone care to help me out a bit? Really am intrigued but not sure how to get started with that as a blocker.
- dan00 12y ago
  I just followed the installation description and during the first start of emacs (after the 'git clone' of spacemacs) several things get downloaded and installed, and then I got asked if I would like to have vim or emacs like keybindings.
- mijoharas 12y ago
  You should do. I've been using it for a while and am a big fan of it so far. If you've got any questions about how exactly to do something there's a quite active gitter room[0]. There could be a problem with a new feature (from maybe yesterday?, the day before?) that allows users to pick between emacs and vim keybindings. [0] https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Also, if you have problems, ask the community: https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs
octref 12y ago
As a Vim user I really want to give Emacs a try and this seems to be a great starting point, but: Does this support configs in my .vimrc? Can I use Vim plugins in it?
- jtmoulia 12y ago
  No to both. Despite using Vim-like modal bindings it is implemented in Elisp and uses Emacs packages.
- pyre 12y ago
  > Does this support configs in my .vimrc? Nope. > Can I use Vim plugins in it? Nope. Evil Mode exposes Emacs using a Vim interface. It's doubtful that it will ever run Vim plugins or read your .vimrc (particularly because it will not support things like autocmd or VimL). There are many ports of Vim plugins to Emacs for use with Evil. For example, evil-leader[1] brings support for leaders (Spacemacs makes heavy use of this with <Space> as the leader, hence the name). There are also many things in the Emacs world that Vim doesn't really have, like flycheck[2] or a decent hex editor (I've used vim + xxd, but Emacs' hex editor is nicer). [1] https://github.com/cofi/evil-leader https://github.com/cofi/evil-leader [2] https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck EDIT: It's not a drop-in Vim replacement in the way that NeoVim is. It just brings modal editing and your Vim muscle memory to working in Emacs.
- dkns 12y ago
  No, this is emacs with vim keybinds (and other goodies like leader key) implemented via evil-mode. It's one of the best if not the best vim emulation you can find. But other than modal editing everything else is emacs. Configs, plugins, elisp etc.
cranium 12y ago
I switched a few months ago and I must say I'm really impressed: there is (nearly) no Vim feature I miss! Out-of-the-box features/packages I like: - Default powerline is cool - "guide-key" package: as you may know, Emacs is based on successions of key bindings to call a function, guide-key tells you what key binding you can do next. Example: "SPC p" is the prefix for most "projectile" (project explorer package) commands, so guide-key shows you what keys you can press and its associated function/subgroup. I think it's the best way to learn your key bindings! - (from vanilla Emacs, enhanced with Helm) M-x: call a function. While it doesn't seem impressive, EVERY ACTION is a function in Emacs! You can call "evil-next-line" (even if it's now really useful) or "set-default-font", and with Helm you can search in real time what you want. If I want to create a table in org-mode: "M-x org cre" brings "org-create-table". No need to remember the function full name! - org-mode: Think of it as an editor for all non-code tasks. I personally do my graded homeworks in it and then exporting these in latex/pdf. "C-c C-e l o" <- export file in latex, generate pdf and open. Really quick to do! Final words: happy to have switched to Emacs, I don't really miss my Vim environment because there are a lot of alternatives out of the box in Spacemacs (thanks to the good integration of Evil). BTW, I still use Vim to do quick edits in the terminal, solely because Emacs takes more time to boot :)
- atjoslin 12y ago
  Run `emacs -nw --daemon` to start a background emacs server. Now, you can do `emacsclient -nw <file>` to boot up with almost no startup time. I have vi aliased to this, and `emacs -nw --daemon` opened by launchctl. A gotcha: If you change your emacs config and need to restart, be sure to `pkill emacs` to get rid of the daemon.
  - LukeShu 12y ago
    Or `emacsclient -e '(kill-emacs)'` in case you have anything open or whatever.
  - manish_gill 12y ago
    The one thing I hate about emacs client (and I was bitching about it on #emacs the other day as well) is that in OS X, a windowed client will just "hang" when exited. It will still be visible in the cmd-tab list, and thus isn't truly exited. Hence, if I want to remove that annoying non-running client, I basically have to kill the daemon and restart. This is particularly annoying when I'm editing configuration. And in many cases, using just the terminal isn't enough because there are quite a few quirks when using emacs in the terminal, the most recent one I found was that <shift><tab> is interpreted as M-[. I wish there was some way to fix this. :(
atjoslin 12y ago
I used Vim my whole career. But I always hated all the little bugs. Then I found Spacemacs a couple weeks ago and switched. I had an equivalent environment set up in a few days. Now I'm moving forward with the ability to do almost anything I want, and all of Vim's warts gone. Vim really is a shitty editor with an awesome UI on top. Emacs is a completely configurable, actually good editor. Now with Vim's awesome UI.
- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  Vim is shit so you installed a vim emulator?
  - tuhdo 12y ago
    He said that the Vim UI is good (aka the modal editing) but everything else is crap. So, Evil gives that interface and better platform.
deleted 12y ago
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cies 12y ago
I'm using this for a week now. Switched to it from Emacs Prelude (another config kit), and before that Vim itself. I use Vim a lot less now: still have a simple .vimrc laying around for just-in-case.
DannoHung 12y ago
I've tried a number of Vim replacements in the past that always omit really key features like macros, searching, correct escape configuration (Ctrl-[ god damnit!), g/s/v commands and any other number of things. Is this one really, ACTUALLY a good vim substitute? Or do I have to relearn a ton of stuff just to get to the same level of knowledge and comfort I have with Vim?
- eeZi 12y ago
  It's so good that some people call it a Vim re-implementation, not an emulator.
- axiomabsolute 12y ago
  It's not perfect, there's still some learning to do around the fringes where it interacts with emacs, but it is by far the BEST vik - like - but - not - vim experience I've seen so far. Much better than Sublime's vintage or any of the IDEs that provide Vim keybindings.
Xephyrous 12y ago
I've been using spacemacs off and on for a few months, (although never as my primary editor). I really like their out-of-the-box config, and it's much easier and better than my previous copypasted amalgamation of an init.el file. I have a few qualms with it though. - It completely takes over emacs. Your modifications now go in ~/.spacemacs. Don't touch ~/.emacs.d/ Want to install something from melpa? Make a spacemacs configuration layer. That aspect feels like a strong step away from the emacs ethos where you're on the same footing as the editor authors. I don't like the inversion of control. - It's unstable. Fairly often I'll update and something will fail, leaving me helplessly with emacs keybindings. Thankfully, a revert is easy. - The last one is a problem with evil in general, you'll still occasionally find yourself in emacs mode, where hjlk and more importantly ":q" don't work
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Well it's still in Beta though but I must say it's still excellent. This is from an Emacs user, currently using holy-mode (basically another way of saying Emacs mode in Spacemacs terminology and it's actually a mode configured for Emacs users).
Phlogistique 12y ago
I tried to use it to switch to Emacs, and was disappointed like each time I try to switch to Emacs. Among the problems and warts: - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md) - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo" - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs. - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth. - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this. If there were just one or two of these warts and inconveniences, I would get use to them or fix them, but right now there are a little too much. That said, the premise is really attractive, so I can only hope these problems will get fixed over the years so that I can go back to it someday.
- tuhdo 12y ago
  > - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md) You can explore the doc for each layer by "SPC f e h". You can even jump to source from there. > - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs Everything that works in stock Emacs should work in Spacemacs. Stock Emacs key bindings are always there. Spacemacs stuff, as its name implies, is in the SPC key. > - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo" I think it should exist. Maybe you need to ask the gitter chatroom. Stuffs like s/foo/bar works for me. However, even NeoVim wants to remove it: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089 https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089 > - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs. You do it with evil-escape: https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape, which is built-in Spacemacs by default and press "fd to escape everything. You can change it to anything you want. > - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth. The next version you can use "SPC b n" and "SPC b p" to go back and forth. However, you can use "SPC b s" to switch between buffers and press "C-c o" to open another window side by side. To split window, use "SPC b -" to create a window below and "SCP b /" to create a window right. Jump to each window based on the number on its modeline, i.e. "SPC 1" jumps to window 1, "SPC 2" to jump to window 2. > - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this. It's a feature. It means that when you switch to a non-existent buffer, you can press RET to create it. It's quite handy to create a scartch buffer of a specific major mode. If you want to open a file, don't use a command that open buffer but a command that open files. I believe in Vim I can create empty buffers.
ufo 12y ago
A friend showed spacemacs to me a while ago but, as a vim user who knows nothing about emacs, I got lost very quickly. I never knew if a problem I was having was due to not knowing how to use emacs or to not knowing how to use spacemacs. Does anyone know any tips or references for total emacs newbies trying to jump into spacemacs head first?
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Here is your tutorial, from a Vimmer: http://ian.mccowan.space/2015/04/07/Spacemacs/ http://ian.mccowan.space/2015/04/07/Spacemacs/
mct 12y ago
I get my hopes up when I see another vim emulation project, but after using it for just a few minutes, I already found a few missing vim features I use every day: * Toggling if search results should be highlighted (:set hls, :set nohls) * Opening the filename under the cursor in a new window (^W f) Completely emulating an entirely different editor is very, very difficult :-( I applaud everyone contributing to these projects, and hope they continue to improve! They've already come a very long way from evil, and viper-mode.
- tuhdo 12y ago
  > * Toggling if search results should be highlighted (:set hls, :set nohls) After you search, you get persistent highlighting. To turn it off, "SPC s c". All the toggling features are in "SPC t" group. > * Opening the filename under the cursor in a new window (^W f) `SPC f h` then press `C-c o`. The key bindings are consistent in other Helm commands as well. It opens a window side by side. Nothing is misisng, sorry. Spacemacs can even do things like [these](http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html). If you have any question, ask it on Spacemacs chatroom: https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs
  - mct 12y ago
    You're right, "missing" was a poor choice of words. I meant, "vim keybindings for these commands isn't supported". They are keybindings my fingers reach for everyday without thinking about it, similar to how I use j, k, h, l without thinking about it.
    - tuhdo 12y ago
      There's a reason it's called Spacemacs, not NeoVim and major features are centered around the SPC leader key. There are certain things you must learn from Emacs if you want to get the benefit of it, such as Emacs packages. To make it easier to learn, there's a popup with keys and commands there. If you press ?, it brings a cheatsheet like interactive window and you can narrow it down by start typing and press `C-z` to open each command description. For example, if you want to know what each command in `SPC f` does, pres `SPC f ?` then press `C-z` on a command and you get a description on upper window.
krick 12y ago
Just tried it and despite some people here claiming vim-style support is really full I found it pretty unusable for me, the vim user. Which is a pity, as I find vim lacking many features emacs has (or allows to implement easily), but am struggling to switch. My workflow starts from command-mode and is heavily dependent on it. It's far more crucial than any hjkl stuff and whatever. The first thing I tried was :tabnew. "Uknown command: `tabnew`." Then I tried to use :cd and while it has such a command it works in some weird way which I couldn't figure out how to use on the first attempt. I guess it actually has everything I need, but I probably entered something wrong and suddenly ended up using scp, lol. While editing some text file without any real purpose I surprisingly didn't find anything that would be working in an unexpected way yet. Maybe it's worth trying it out.
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Maybe you should learn the Spacemacs way (which is the combination of Vim and Emacs) rather than expecting it the Vim way. To create new buffer, `SPC b s` and enter new buffer name. To change directory and get into it, use `SPC f f` or `SPC f h` depends on your preference.
  - krick 12y ago
    Yeah, I'm skimming through docs right now. Yet what I find so far feels pretty unintuitive, because, as I said, vim was more about command mode to me, rather than default key bindings. That space key thing is quite unfortunate to me as well, because I'm used to binding spacebar to @q (works really well!). However, `SPC b s` also doesn't what I was looking for. It opens a buffer, not a tab (which I'm not sure are supported in Spacemacs at all, which would be a critical hit). And it doesn't even look for them in the cwd, but does I-haven't-figured-out-what-yet instead. If you are wondering why that SPC stuff isn't the equivalent to command-mode with ":" bound to SPC: commands are easy to define even in vim, they can have descriptive names due to their nature and I don't have to remember them, as I can use auto-complete! For example, I have :Rename and :Remove. Actually, I don't even remember if it's :Remove or :Delete, I just use autocompletion every time I need it and find out.
PuercoPop 12y ago
Any reason why the documentation is in md and not in info for easy navigation from inside emacs?
- tuhdo 12y ago
  So you can put it on the web for complete Emacs newbies to read rather than forcing them to learn Info reading. However, Spacemacs does integrate info+ that makes Info reading much more pleasant, along with helm-info command that I can say Emacs becomes the best info reader every.
  - technomancy 12y ago
    Info can be easily exported to HTML just like Markdown can.
Estragon 12y ago
I tried this a few days ago, it seems like a cool concept, but I found the whole thing a bit bewildering. Is there a tutorial for it like emacs's C-h t?
SteveBash 12y ago
I've tried to switch my workflow from vim + tmux + tmuxinator to spacemacs a few months ago, and I must say that it easily could replace my Vim environment, there was evil-surround, evil-nerd-commenter, etc. even neotree, and plus I got org-mode, other really great packages and the power of emacs, however I didn't find a replacement for the tmuxinator part, I need it since I usually have projects with several shells in different windows and panes aside from vim, so in the end that detained me from doing the switch and continued with vim.
- fanf2 12y ago
  Try emacs shell-mode. It's a bit weird but you might like having your shells in your editor.

227 points by weavie 12y ago

I like this development. I feel that we have three editors (really types thereof) for a reason. The Sublime/TM/Notepad++ crowd cares about OS-native integration. I use Sublime frequently because after a solid decade+ living in OSX land, my fingers know how what to do, and neither vim nor emacs respect that without considerable massaging. Vim fans want to use an elegant command syntax. I watch vim users code and always make a point to learn how to vim, eventually. The only reason I don't, is because I haven't. Emacs users want/need the programmable, extensible runtime. Emacs is a programming language; particularly in Lisp development, Emacs often contains programs that are basic/standard parts of the toolchain and not found in other editors. I use Emacs because I like it, but more importantly, because I have to. Combining the elegant syntax of Vim with the extensibility of Emacs, as well as some out-of-the-box support for the basic OS-native commands, is a very good start.

giancarlostoro 12y ago
Personally I enjoy any editor that doesn't get in my way, I really want to learn Emacs and / or Vim, but it's not exactly a downhill experience as say Notepad++, Atom, and other editors. I enjoy the idea of having all the Emacs or Vim super powers, but I can't seem to get used to it, I either use nano while on the terminal or just a full on IDE.
- vonkow 12y ago
  Learning vim is like learning Kung Fu, you practice the same awkward route motions until they're so natural that you don't even notice you're doing them. Sadly, it's not a quick process, but it's worth it.
  - lottin 12y ago
    It's true. It made me develop an automatic reflex to hit the Esc key every time after inserting a couple of characters, even when I wasn't using vi at all. It was pretty annoying. Imagine typing a document in Word and pressing Esc constantly. Fortunately I switched to Emacs and the reflex went away.
    - MarcScott 12y ago
      But don't you find yourself hitting C-a to go to the beginning of a line and then insert a line break, then inadvertently deleting everything on the page. As an Emacs user, I do this all the time.
      - sodifoiu 12y ago
        One nice thing about OSX is that some emacs movements work in most programs. C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-k, C-y (kill yank not quite the same) Edit: C-f and C-b too Edit 2: Just checked and word is not one of these programs :(
        sea6ear 12y ago
        Here's a link to add Emacs keybindings to Word on Mac OS X. Hopefully it's still accurate. http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-word/ http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-wor...
  - ThrustVectoring 12y ago
    It's faster than you'd think. I was far better with Vim than Textmate within a month of my switch.
- integraton 12y ago
  Part of the foundation of understanding and appreciating text editors is understanding and appreciating the value of text, rather than trying to abstract it away under an IDE's several layers of GUI controls, widgets, and platform-specific APIs often designed by a single company that's trying to convince you to lock the future of your career and/or company to its platform. Furthermore, neither emacs nor vim are hard to learn. There's a widespread myth perpetuated both by novices and elitists that it's an all or nothing kind of thing. The reality is that even in vim you can use arrow keys and mouse/trackpad scrolling and ignore hjkl if you want. You could, for example, use terminal vim every single day and use only about 5.5 vim-specific commands: i, ctrl-c, :w, :q / :q!, and ZZ. With gvim or macvim, you could reduce that to two: i and ctrl-c.
patejam 12y ago
FWIW, I use Sublime/Jetbrain products for most of my programming and I always turn on vim keybindings. It isn't 100% the same as actual vim, but it is still faster than a mouse for me.
- mmahemoff 12y ago
  I've never got into any of these Vi/Vim emulators because they vary from pure Vim in subtly unexpected ways and typically don't support plugins or vimrc setup. Neovim will change all that, being based on direct socket-based communication with actual Vim, so it really will be possible to get the best of both worlds.
- expando 12y ago
  ideavim is easily the best vim emulation I had ever used until I tried spacemacs/evil. Ideavim blew the eclipse vim modes out of the water
  - colordrops 12y ago
    And they fixed some annoying inconsistencies with recent releases. It's pretty good now. Makes developing Java in an IDE tolerable.
greggyb 12y ago
I feel similarly to this. Emacs got extensibility down and probably would have destroyed Vi. Vim added Vimscript, but it is not what most would call elegant, nice, or any of the other things we want in a language. Adding extensibility is what kept Vim around. I like the design of Emacs, and I also like Lisps in general, but the Vim editing model is the best for me. It looks like Neovim is going to address many of the issues with Vim.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  As an emacs fan, I find vim model simple, abstract and efficient. Emacs default paradigm has amazing foundations but give fingercuts too often and lack composability while vim is quite self consistent (how ironic giving lisp essence). That said, growing your editing system by evaluation a small function is still a bliss. Go lisps. #repant
  - greggyb 12y ago
    That's a very good way to put it. Vim's editing model is much more functional (a la functional programming) than Emacs', whereas the latter's foundation is much more functional. I keep thinking I should try Emacs with one of the Vim-ulators, but I've got a pretty good flow going in Vim and I've got a lot of other things I'm trying to learn right now, not to mention paying work to do.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Me too, since many people report emacs evil mode being pretty polished by now, I'm tempted to try a fresh emacs setup. There's also lispy.el, which is IIUC a paredit superset in vi-command-clothing.
      - tuhdo 12y ago
        It's not for Vim anymore but can adapt to many editing styles.
      - mikekchar 12y ago
falcolas 12y ago
Not to take away from the rest of your comment, but Macvim in insert mode works exactly like any other Mac text entry program. All of your regular keyboard shortcuts work as you expect them to, as does the mouse.

thorwavimwawa 12y ago

So.... who wants this? Vim users like vim as it is, warts and all. Emacs users already use emacs and typically don't want to learn vim.

iand675 12y ago
I'm using it with pretty good results so far. I had to stop using Emacs for a long time because I was developing a case of Emacs pinky, but I can appreciate that it does a lot more out of the box. After switching to Vim, I really came to appreciate its idioms too. Spacemacs lets me get the best of both worlds.
adlpz 12y ago
I want this. Well, in fact, I already use Emacs with Vim keybindings, so I don't need it, but I would have loved it some time ago. What I (and I believe most vim users) like about vim is not the software itself, but the concept and ideas behind it: the modal editing, the movement commands, the composability of them, etc. But the truth is that Emacs is, for lots of usages, better software. It's more extendable, has more features, it's even better written. So using Emacs with a vim-friendly UX seems like a great idea.
Xcelerate 12y ago
That's a bit of an overgeneralization. I'm a vim user, but am always willing to learn something that works better for me.
tincholio 12y ago
Just to provide a counter example... I've been a long-time (13 years or so) Emacs user, and some 3 or 4 years ago, I switched to modal editing using Evil. I find it simply simpler and more efficient than traditional Emacs bindings. I actually started using vim more often after that, too.
hammerandtongs 12y ago
Twenty five year Vi(m) user here. I switched to Evil and Emacs last year. The combination of Vim and Emacs is a much better Vim. org-mode is life changing. In general I've found that the plugins in the Emacs environment make more sense and simply work better then Vim equivalents.

_cipher_ 12y ago

When I saw this thread, the initial thought I had was "pff, another emacs thread about vim users". But this is absolutely perfect (either for transition, or for someone like me that just wants to try a transition but does not know where to start). Thanks for sharing. Beautiful work. :)

rhgraysonii 12y ago

So I installed it. I know nothing about emacs, have followed setup etc. It appears I definitely dont have Vi keybindings upon re-opening it after initial install. Anyone care to help me out a bit? Really am intrigued but not sure how to get started with that as a blocker.

dan00 12y ago
I just followed the installation description and during the first start of emacs (after the 'git clone' of spacemacs) several things get downloaded and installed, and then I got asked if I would like to have vim or emacs like keybindings.
mijoharas 12y ago
You should do. I've been using it for a while and am a big fan of it so far. If you've got any questions about how exactly to do something there's a quite active gitter room[0]. There could be a problem with a new feature (from maybe yesterday?, the day before?) that allows users to pick between emacs and vim keybindings. [0] https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs
tuhdo 12y ago
Also, if you have problems, ask the community: https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs

octref 12y ago

As a Vim user I really want to give Emacs a try and this seems to be a great starting point, but: Does this support configs in my .vimrc? Can I use Vim plugins in it?

jtmoulia 12y ago
No to both. Despite using Vim-like modal bindings it is implemented in Elisp and uses Emacs packages.
pyre 12y ago
> Does this support configs in my .vimrc? Nope. > Can I use Vim plugins in it? Nope. Evil Mode exposes Emacs using a Vim interface. It's doubtful that it will ever run Vim plugins or read your .vimrc (particularly because it will not support things like autocmd or VimL). There are many ports of Vim plugins to Emacs for use with Evil. For example, evil-leader[1] brings support for leaders (Spacemacs makes heavy use of this with <Space> as the leader, hence the name). There are also many things in the Emacs world that Vim doesn't really have, like flycheck[2] or a decent hex editor (I've used vim + xxd, but Emacs' hex editor is nicer). [1] https://github.com/cofi/evil-leader https://github.com/cofi/evil-leader [2] https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck EDIT: It's not a drop-in Vim replacement in the way that NeoVim is. It just brings modal editing and your Vim muscle memory to working in Emacs.
dkns 12y ago
No, this is emacs with vim keybinds (and other goodies like leader key) implemented via evil-mode. It's one of the best if not the best vim emulation you can find. But other than modal editing everything else is emacs. Configs, plugins, elisp etc.

cranium 12y ago

I switched a few months ago and I must say I'm really impressed: there is (nearly) no Vim feature I miss! Out-of-the-box features/packages I like: - Default powerline is cool - "guide-key" package: as you may know, Emacs is based on successions of key bindings to call a function, guide-key tells you what key binding you can do next. Example: "SPC p" is the prefix for most "projectile" (project explorer package) commands, so guide-key shows you what keys you can press and its associated function/subgroup. I think it's the best way to learn your key bindings! - (from vanilla Emacs, enhanced with Helm) M-x: call a function. While it doesn't seem impressive, EVERY ACTION is a function in Emacs! You can call "evil-next-line" (even if it's now really useful) or "set-default-font", and with Helm you can search in real time what you want. If I want to create a table in org-mode: "M-x org cre" brings "org-create-table". No need to remember the function full name! - org-mode: Think of it as an editor for all non-code tasks. I personally do my graded homeworks in it and then exporting these in latex/pdf. "C-c C-e l o" <- export file in latex, generate pdf and open. Really quick to do! Final words: happy to have switched to Emacs, I don't really miss my Vim environment because there are a lot of alternatives out of the box in Spacemacs (thanks to the good integration of Evil). BTW, I still use Vim to do quick edits in the terminal, solely because Emacs takes more time to boot :)

atjoslin 12y ago
Run `emacs -nw --daemon` to start a background emacs server. Now, you can do `emacsclient -nw <file>` to boot up with almost no startup time. I have vi aliased to this, and `emacs -nw --daemon` opened by launchctl. A gotcha: If you change your emacs config and need to restart, be sure to `pkill emacs` to get rid of the daemon.
- LukeShu 12y ago
  Or `emacsclient -e '(kill-emacs)'` in case you have anything open or whatever.
- manish_gill 12y ago
  The one thing I hate about emacs client (and I was bitching about it on #emacs the other day as well) is that in OS X, a windowed client will just "hang" when exited. It will still be visible in the cmd-tab list, and thus isn't truly exited. Hence, if I want to remove that annoying non-running client, I basically have to kill the daemon and restart. This is particularly annoying when I'm editing configuration. And in many cases, using just the terminal isn't enough because there are quite a few quirks when using emacs in the terminal, the most recent one I found was that <shift><tab> is interpreted as M-[. I wish there was some way to fix this. :(

atjoslin 12y ago

I used Vim my whole career. But I always hated all the little bugs. Then I found Spacemacs a couple weeks ago and switched. I had an equivalent environment set up in a few days. Now I'm moving forward with the ability to do almost anything I want, and all of Vim's warts gone. Vim really is a shitty editor with an awesome UI on top. Emacs is a completely configurable, actually good editor. Now with Vim's awesome UI.

zxcvcxz 12y ago
Vim is shit so you installed a vim emulator?
- tuhdo 12y ago
  He said that the Vim UI is good (aka the modal editing) but everything else is crap. So, Evil gives that interface and better platform.

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cies 12y ago

I'm using this for a week now. Switched to it from Emacs Prelude (another config kit), and before that Vim itself. I use Vim a lot less now: still have a simple .vimrc laying around for just-in-case.

DannoHung 12y ago

I've tried a number of Vim replacements in the past that always omit really key features like macros, searching, correct escape configuration (Ctrl-[ god damnit!), g/s/v commands and any other number of things. Is this one really, ACTUALLY a good vim substitute? Or do I have to relearn a ton of stuff just to get to the same level of knowledge and comfort I have with Vim?

eeZi 12y ago
It's so good that some people call it a Vim re-implementation, not an emulator.
axiomabsolute 12y ago
It's not perfect, there's still some learning to do around the fringes where it interacts with emacs, but it is by far the BEST vik - like - but - not - vim experience I've seen so far. Much better than Sublime's vintage or any of the IDEs that provide Vim keybindings.

Xephyrous 12y ago

I've been using spacemacs off and on for a few months, (although never as my primary editor). I really like their out-of-the-box config, and it's much easier and better than my previous copypasted amalgamation of an init.el file. I have a few qualms with it though. - It completely takes over emacs. Your modifications now go in ~/.spacemacs. Don't touch ~/.emacs.d/ Want to install something from melpa? Make a spacemacs configuration layer. That aspect feels like a strong step away from the emacs ethos where you're on the same footing as the editor authors. I don't like the inversion of control. - It's unstable. Fairly often I'll update and something will fail, leaving me helplessly with emacs keybindings. Thankfully, a revert is easy. - The last one is a problem with evil in general, you'll still occasionally find yourself in emacs mode, where hjlk and more importantly ":q" don't work

tuhdo 12y ago
Well it's still in Beta though but I must say it's still excellent. This is from an Emacs user, currently using holy-mode (basically another way of saying Emacs mode in Spacemacs terminology and it's actually a mode configured for Emacs users).

Phlogistique 12y ago

I tried to use it to switch to Emacs, and was disappointed like each time I try to switch to Emacs. Among the problems and warts: - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md) - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo" - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs. - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth. - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this. If there were just one or two of these warts and inconveniences, I would get use to them or fix them, but right now there are a little too much. That said, the premise is really attractive, so I can only hope these problems will get fixed over the years so that I can go back to it someday.

tuhdo 12y ago
> - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md) You can explore the doc for each layer by "SPC f e h". You can even jump to source from there. > - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs Everything that works in stock Emacs should work in Spacemacs. Stock Emacs key bindings are always there. Spacemacs stuff, as its name implies, is in the SPC key. > - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo" I think it should exist. Maybe you need to ask the gitter chatroom. Stuffs like s/foo/bar works for me. However, even NeoVim wants to remove it: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089 https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089 > - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs. You do it with evil-escape: https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape, which is built-in Spacemacs by default and press "fd to escape everything. You can change it to anything you want. > - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth. The next version you can use "SPC b n" and "SPC b p" to go back and forth. However, you can use "SPC b s" to switch between buffers and press "C-c o" to open another window side by side. To split window, use "SPC b -" to create a window below and "SCP b /" to create a window right. Jump to each window based on the number on its modeline, i.e. "SPC 1" jumps to window 1, "SPC 2" to jump to window 2. > - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this. It's a feature. It means that when you switch to a non-existent buffer, you can press RET to create it. It's quite handy to create a scartch buffer of a specific major mode. If you want to open a file, don't use a command that open buffer but a command that open files. I believe in Vim I can create empty buffers.

ufo 12y ago

A friend showed spacemacs to me a while ago but, as a vim user who knows nothing about emacs, I got lost very quickly. I never knew if a problem I was having was due to not knowing how to use emacs or to not knowing how to use spacemacs. Does anyone know any tips or references for total emacs newbies trying to jump into spacemacs head first?

tuhdo 12y ago
Here is your tutorial, from a Vimmer: http://ian.mccowan.space/2015/04/07/Spacemacs/ http://ian.mccowan.space/2015/04/07/Spacemacs/

mct 12y ago

I get my hopes up when I see another vim emulation project, but after using it for just a few minutes, I already found a few missing vim features I use every day: * Toggling if search results should be highlighted (:set hls, :set nohls) * Opening the filename under the cursor in a new window (^W f) Completely emulating an entirely different editor is very, very difficult :-( I applaud everyone contributing to these projects, and hope they continue to improve! They've already come a very long way from evil, and viper-mode.

tuhdo 12y ago
> * Toggling if search results should be highlighted (:set hls, :set nohls) After you search, you get persistent highlighting. To turn it off, "SPC s c". All the toggling features are in "SPC t" group. > * Opening the filename under the cursor in a new window (^W f) `SPC f h` then press `C-c o`. The key bindings are consistent in other Helm commands as well. It opens a window side by side. Nothing is misisng, sorry. Spacemacs can even do things like [these](http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html). If you have any question, ask it on Spacemacs chatroom: https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs
- mct 12y ago
  You're right, "missing" was a poor choice of words. I meant, "vim keybindings for these commands isn't supported". They are keybindings my fingers reach for everyday without thinking about it, similar to how I use j, k, h, l without thinking about it.
  - tuhdo 12y ago
    There's a reason it's called Spacemacs, not NeoVim and major features are centered around the SPC leader key. There are certain things you must learn from Emacs if you want to get the benefit of it, such as Emacs packages. To make it easier to learn, there's a popup with keys and commands there. If you press ?, it brings a cheatsheet like interactive window and you can narrow it down by start typing and press `C-z` to open each command description. For example, if you want to know what each command in `SPC f` does, pres `SPC f ?` then press `C-z` on a command and you get a description on upper window.

krick 12y ago

Just tried it and despite some people here claiming vim-style support is really full I found it pretty unusable for me, the vim user. Which is a pity, as I find vim lacking many features emacs has (or allows to implement easily), but am struggling to switch. My workflow starts from command-mode and is heavily dependent on it. It's far more crucial than any hjkl stuff and whatever. The first thing I tried was :tabnew. "Uknown command: `tabnew`." Then I tried to use :cd and while it has such a command it works in some weird way which I couldn't figure out how to use on the first attempt. I guess it actually has everything I need, but I probably entered something wrong and suddenly ended up using scp, lol. While editing some text file without any real purpose I surprisingly didn't find anything that would be working in an unexpected way yet. Maybe it's worth trying it out.

tuhdo 12y ago
Maybe you should learn the Spacemacs way (which is the combination of Vim and Emacs) rather than expecting it the Vim way. To create new buffer, `SPC b s` and enter new buffer name. To change directory and get into it, use `SPC f f` or `SPC f h` depends on your preference.
- krick 12y ago
  Yeah, I'm skimming through docs right now. Yet what I find so far feels pretty unintuitive, because, as I said, vim was more about command mode to me, rather than default key bindings. That space key thing is quite unfortunate to me as well, because I'm used to binding spacebar to @q (works really well!). However, `SPC b s` also doesn't what I was looking for. It opens a buffer, not a tab (which I'm not sure are supported in Spacemacs at all, which would be a critical hit). And it doesn't even look for them in the cwd, but does I-haven't-figured-out-what-yet instead. If you are wondering why that SPC stuff isn't the equivalent to command-mode with ":" bound to SPC: commands are easy to define even in vim, they can have descriptive names due to their nature and I don't have to remember them, as I can use auto-complete! For example, I have :Rename and :Remove. Actually, I don't even remember if it's :Remove or :Delete, I just use autocompletion every time I need it and find out.

PuercoPop 12y ago

Any reason why the documentation is in md and not in info for easy navigation from inside emacs?

tuhdo 12y ago
So you can put it on the web for complete Emacs newbies to read rather than forcing them to learn Info reading. However, Spacemacs does integrate info+ that makes Info reading much more pleasant, along with helm-info command that I can say Emacs becomes the best info reader every.
- technomancy 12y ago
  Info can be easily exported to HTML just like Markdown can.

Estragon 12y ago

I tried this a few days ago, it seems like a cool concept, but I found the whole thing a bit bewildering. Is there a tutorial for it like emacs's C-h t?

SteveBash 12y ago

I've tried to switch my workflow from vim + tmux + tmuxinator to spacemacs a few months ago, and I must say that it easily could replace my Vim environment, there was evil-surround, evil-nerd-commenter, etc. even neotree, and plus I got org-mode, other really great packages and the power of emacs, however I didn't find a replacement for the tmuxinator part, I need it since I usually have projects with several shells in different windows and panes aside from vim, so in the end that detained me from doing the switch and continued with vim.

fanf2 12y ago
Try emacs shell-mode. It's a bit weird but you might like having your shells in your editor.