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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

I've been using emacs for about 20yrs as my main coding editor and vi regularly as a fast command line editor. Can some one explain in clear terms why I would want to learn a new set of key bindings? What are the advantages of spacemacs other than a better configuration system and nifty graphics? Both the Github page and website do a terrible job of explaining this, IMO. Maybe the answer is that it was not made for me.

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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.

Spacemacs is just a configuration over Emacs and as a result is customizable with elisp as well.

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)

Does anyone have any opinions on the keystroke efficiency of vim vs classic Emacs bindings? I still use vim and Emacs occasionally, when I'm not in Xcode. vim is my quick cli editor and Emacs is always open because I find using macros quick and efficient, plus I use org files. I've never mastered vim, but the precision users strive for is noteworthy. I've often wondered if I'd press half as many keys daily if I mastered vim.

http://vimgolf.com

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).

How is this any better than e.g. viper mode?

The main feature of Spacemacs over just plain evil is that it has a number of "layers" for different languages, utilities and emacs things, which introduce consistent, vim-friendly keybindings. With plain evil-mode, you'd have to tinker with every package you wanted to use and come up with some good vim-style keybindings.

The Spacemacs layer setup does restrict you to what it supports, unless you want to do things manually.

it's a wrapper around the successor to viper mode (evil) that also attempts to introduce bindings in a smart (ymmv, obv) way.

it's much more than just viper, but the ultimate goal is the same: to provide emacs with vim keybindings for prefer to want to use emacs that way.

My understanding is the evil-mode emulates Vim, and viper-mode emulates Vi. Vim is "Vi iMproved", so it has more to it than just basic Vi.

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