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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

A colleague is using it and I had a look, but it seems kind of weird because it doesn't seem like Emacs any more to the point where I couldn't easily do Emacs stuff with it.

I've been using regular old Emacs for about 20 years. For those more familiar with Spacemacs, how hard is it to accomplish some of what it does, or transition to a more normal Emacs setup once you get to like Emacs?

Edit - this is just out of curiosity. I hope to use Emacs for another 20 years at least :-)

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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.

IMHO, the layers are pretty easy to put together if you're comfortable with your Emacs configuration. The first one I coded up (for notmuch) was done inside an hour and that's when I was new to Spacemacs.

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`.

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