Spacemacs 0.105.0 released

I've been using Emacs for the past decade and I switched to Spacemacs after declaring my second .emacs bankruptcy sometime last year after it got support for regular Emacs keybingings, (setq-default dotspacemacs-editing-style 'emacs).

First one was four years ago, my configuration was rendered completely useless after starting to use OS X and I didn't know where to start, so I forked https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d and rebuilt my config on top of it.

Second one was because every time I take a break from a language like Clojure and Haskell for three months and then get back to it my config for the relevant modes get obsolete. Spacemacs has a big community that continuously adapts language layers to the changes on upstream and provides the best experience for development behind a few flags like "(haskell-enable-ghc-mod-support t)".

After switching to spacemacs my configuration went from 2023 lines of code in the original config I forked + 1005 lines of my own to a .spacemacs.d/init.el file that's 243 lines long (without comments). It provides 90% of stuff I want out of box, and provides many more features I never discovered/configured and most importantly it takes the burden of maintaining stuff I only occasionally use from my hands.

If you are not happy with some stuff fundamental to Spacemacs such as Helm I don't recommend it but otherwise give it a try, it is really easy disable Evil integration if you are used to regular Emacs keybindings.

I like spacemacs because pressing spacebar brings up the command palette and lets me preview all the various menus I can bring up via a keypress (e.g. w for window, p for projectile, h for helm, s for search, k for evil lisp, m for major mode, etc). I never have to bring my hands up from my keyboard to get anything done. That's awesome.

Spacemacs still leaves a lot to desire. But it's pretty damn close to be the perfect all-in-one text editor I've been looking for.

I've been using Emacs for 1.5 years or so, then switched to VIM for a brief time period and I fell in love with the way it uses keybindings in a grammatical manner, using verbs, prepositions, subjects and objects. For example, the key sequence di" means "delete in parentheses", and similarly diw means "delete current word". It's also very intuitive to switch back and forth between a 'text insertion' (INSERT) and a 'command' (NORMAL) mode, because quite often you do multiple commands at once (e.g. cutting things here, pasting them there). It seems very natural to have completely changed keyboard bindings for a command mode (instead of relying on finger stretches for each command). I also very much prefer line-wise editing (e.g. in visual line mode) now, even though I thought I would never like it. Then I heard about Spacemacs, that it gives you some peer-reviewed configurations and VIM keybindings and I was immediately sold.

> I've been using emacs for about 20yrs as my main coding editor and vi regularly as a fast command line editor.

It was not made for you. If you want to change or automate something, you have the option of either getting Emacs or Vim to do that for you, but only whatever you need.

Do you prefer VI/VIM keybindings to Emacs keybindings?

That's what spacemacs is, in a nutshell. It attempts to marry the keybindings of vim with the technical advantages of emacs (better process handling, server/client setup, etc)

Well, "having a better configuration system and nifty graphics" is no small feat. I've been using Emacs since '97, but lately it's been hard to keep up with the configuration of all modern Emacs extensions. Spacemacs solves this easily.

Basically that's exactly what it is -- a wrapper around the configuration system of emacs to make it more manageable, plus the vi keys option (the normal emacs keys are still there).

I switched to spacemacs because its key bindings don't use ctrl key as much as normal emacs does.

> Can some one explain in clear terms why I would want to learn a new set of key bindings?

The whole point of Spacemacs is integrating things together around evil-mode in its only little package that's ready to go. If you don't have any interest in evil-mode, then I doubt that Spacemacs is for you.

I feel like it's more for vim users who need a gentle introduction to emacs (me) and really don't want to leave modal editing and more advanced vi features behind. It goes a lot further in emulating the day-to-day vi experience than literally anything I've ever tried before. But it's also a pretty nicely managed set of extra packages that are all smacked around to play nicely with each other.

If you've been using emacs for 20 years and already know how to do stuff and maybe even write your own modes, then it's proooobably not for you. (I mean, you coulda been using evil a long time ago).

I love Spacemacs, but the old site looked better. Why all the animation? It's like the Web is devolving back to how it was when it was covered in animated gifs, marquee, and blink elements. Animation doesn't catch my attention -- it makes me want to close the page.

well, that's kinda been the way emacs has been for a while now. They recently added a really easy package managing system which allows for emacs to look and behave drastically different from each other. About making its way into the core, the dev team won't really put anything into the core unless other things in the core require them.

Getting the dev email list to agree to a change of something that is easily added through packages or just init.el/emacs.d/ is difficult if not impossible. But this is a good thing: opinionated workflows are adaptable but not forced on seasoned veterans and newbies alike. Getting good packages into elpa or tasteful additions into core that augment emacs is always welcomed it seems.

Join the development list and just follow discussions. It's always fun to see really smart people talking about new code, extensions, opinions, and the new maintainer John seems to want to do a good job and produce some nice software. I've got it going to my gmail under a label and never filling my inbox so it gives a nice reading break every now and then at work.

Emacs core requires FSF copyright assignment. Most of the configurations in Spacemacs use third party extensions which don't have the assignment.

But being non-core is not really a barrier to installation in my opinion. In many ways it is a plus, allowing for out-of-cycle releases and to experiment / break compatibility at their own pace.

It's already this way in a sense. There are many things that seem more "solid" to me in Vim because there is a default implementation that is baked into the editor. In Emacs, there are several different libraries and various language modes may interact with one or another of those libraries. Many of the various libraries are included in the default Emacs distribution. For example, (IIRC) there are 2 or 3 "folding" libraries that are in Emacs, while Vim just has folding baked in. Sometimes this makes Emacs seem less consistent to me than Vim does.

That is excellent idea. I am learning now and using spacemacs and it makes total sense to have focus on core and allow other teams to be focused on ui and usability.

How long did it take you to convert? Did you relinquish vim key-bindings and cross to straight emacs? I still prefer out of habit vim keystrokes, but I'm having to relearn everything else (buffer navigation, searching, definition navigation etc)

Which both worlds?

I haven't seen any tutorials for writing an emacs-like editor, but I think studying the source of QEmacs [0] and mg [1] is a good starting point.

[0]: http://bellard.org/qemacs/

[1]: http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/

Also, you could take a look at these:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Emacs/Emacs-like_editor...

http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EmacsFamily

You might want to look at Zile:

https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/

The Craft of Text Editing --or-- Emacs for the Modern World

https://www.finseth.com/craft/

I pronounce it spuh-CHEE-max, like the pronunciation of Dr. Spaceman's name on 30 Rock.

Let's take a page from 30 Rock's "Dr. Spaceman" and pronounce it "spah-chem-aks"

But really, I thought it was just "space-macs"

If it were just an editor I would agree, but the #1 killer app, org-mode, puts it in a different class of application.

I've been using Emacs daily for about 2.5 years. This summer I decided to try Spacemacs. While I found the setup pretty smooth, I was unable to get certain behaviors to function like I was used to, so I ended up just going through the package lists and stealing liberarally from their config. The end result is an Emacs that's pretty and has a config I can understand. Plus I learned a lot about elisp.

The important things that simulated the Spacemacs feel for me were these packages: helm, hydra, and powerline. I haven't yet grokked modal editing, so I don't have any experience with vim/evil.

The biggest benefit of Spacemacs is not possible to replicate any other way: you can cd ~/.emacs.d/ and git pull and upgrade your whole configuration directory with new features and nifty additions and provided with org-mode. No more searching "how do I...?" on Emacs StackExchange, because it's very likely whatever feature you're looking for has already been set up for you.

I think you can now configure it to run in "holy mode". In both modes you can still type meta-x (also via `<space>:`).

I think if you had a very customized emacs setup, you'd have to put some effort organizing it into custom "layers", which is how spacemacs organizes its config and making sure you don't have big conflicts in mapped keys.

Pressing `SPC (or M-m) t E e` will switch the editing style to Emacs (cursor becomes blue) and you should be at home :-) From there the Spacemacs key bindings are available behind `M-m`.

It seems to work reasonably well in a terminal, but I found myself wanting to use some features that weren't supported in the terminal. The biggest reason for me to use tmux + vim was vim-slime for editing+repl environment, which basically works out of the box in all of the modes I care about for emacs (clojure/cljs, python, javascript).

I've found emacs to be reasonably pleasant even for things like git operation (via magit). Most of my scripting for projects end up written in python or bash and controlled via a Makefile, and emacs (like vim) fits in perfectly for this. There is very little I use a terminal for these days, and when I do want one, I open it inside of emacs. This keeps me down to emacs + chrome as my only applications running.

It works probably not as well as vim which is a terminal application. Spacemacs is fully featured on the GUI version, the terminal version works well, but be ready to meet a few bugs in the borders :-)

That is exactly what I have been using since early last year. No problems at all if you aren't interested in some of the more esoteric emacs features such as inline images. Give it a shot!

It works great. I use the same setup, and was big into spacemacs and even contributed to it but ended up right back at iterm + tmux + vim again. Vim is faster, and suits my needs better.

Not so well. There are plenty of problems in the term and the community kind of avoids fixing/ta;king about them.

I had some trouble with it: things that only work with a fringe, the theme colors all mixed up, even putting a sensible line number background. And after quite quite some time trying to fix it I decided it was just not worth it and started an emacs config from base (I come from Vim). Now I'm quite happy.

Also, I go back to spacemacs git repo to get ideias, tips for my own emacs config.

Don't know about Spacemacs but Emacs works perfectly fine in a terminal, from skimming, it looks like Spacemacs is more optimized and configured for GUI Emacs than for terminal Emacs.

The more common Emacs workflow is to run a terminal inside of Emacs and edit remote files with Tramp, i.e. with a transparent remote connection.

Pretty much okay. I've been using it in PuTTY and it works, but there's definitely been some jiggery poking to get it to play nicely.

I personally would find spacemacs very overwhelming if I didn't have prior experience with either vim or emacs. My recommendation is to pick one of the two, use it for a while and get some experience, and then consider spacemacs.

There is a Go layer: http://spacemacs.org/layers/+lang/go/README.html

You can launch an evil-tutor to start with Vim key bindings by pressing `SPC h T`.

> is there any way to add Go (golang) support?

The details seems to be here: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/tree/master/layers/%2B...

You should learn Vi-motions even if you won't be using Emacs or Vim. They are useful in other apps like browser or terminal too.

>Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.

Yes. However one of the most attractive features of spacemacs is... that somebody has selected the packages and installed them for you! You don't have to do anything!

Here, https://github.com/coldnew/coldnew-spacemacs He use spacemacs as module inside .emacs.d. May helps.

That already exists. It's Emacs bindings for Vim.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=300

Try `SPC T T`

emacs --daemon and EDITOR='emacsclient'

I noticed that using GUI Emacs in OSX, a first boot is slow and will open two windows: a Spacemacs buffer in one window, and the file in another. Subsequent files are opened much faster if you keep the Spacemacs buffer opened.

To clarify the other answers: you will want to run one or two emacs daemon instances at startup and then edit files using emacsclient, which hooks up to the background daemon and pops up a new window instantaneously.

We know, we have a problem generating links that work both with our new online documentation system and github (syntax incompatibility). For now you have to use http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html :-)

Same for me. Cool package if it floats your boat, but it's not what I look for in an editor, especially the "crowd configured" part.