Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

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I recently tried switching to spacemacs from my custom init.el, and after a half hour switched back. It did inspire me to spend some time improving my setup, but elisp is so simple to work with once you learn it a bit, that there's really no reason not to just roll your own config.

I don't need 200+ key combinations off my leader. I have about 10 for the things I use often, and if I find myself pulling up commands from Alt+X (mapped to space x) regularly, I add that to a new leader mapping.

Use-package is really convenient to learn for setting up your config.

Other than that, the things I find I can't live without:

* Ivy/Counsul * Company * Flyckeck * Flyspell * Evil

If you take a look at spacemacs's GitHub, dive into their "layers" and pop open the packages file for any given layer for inspiration of other things to add for your desired languages/features. But integrate then yourself given the packages' instructions. You'll be far better off knowing your setup intimately than learning to skim the very large surface area of spacemacs.

> You'll be far better off knowing your setup intimately than learning to skim the very large surface area of spacemacs.

I disagree. spacemacs is not all that scary or hard. it's a thin configuration over emacs packages that all work well together. Take for instance the java layer: it has some configs to make completion work well, syntax highlighting, add things to the "mode leader menu that changes per file type" and a few other things. ootb spacemacs works very well and is a pretty good experience.

Might I ask how you've picked up Emacs?

Did you start with Spacemacs or did you have prior experience and understanding of Emacs?

Never used emacs before and I was a power vim user that was sick of all the vim extensions feeling hacky and not integrated together nicely(the vim scripting language, viml, is awful and it's no wonder that these extensions are hacky) and liked the idea of spacemacs because I used a basic version of it on vim with space as my leader. no which key popup on vim so the bindings were very simple and you had to remember them by heart (I think I used `spc e v` for "edit vimrc" and `spc e z` for edit the zsh dotfile. spc-= to format the entire file etc.)

I jumped into spacemacs and figured out how to do the vimrc bindings that I had in emacs lisp. I watched a few videos[1] from the creator of spacemacs to see how he configured his and to see what was the way to navigate files in spacemacs correctly.

watch a magit video[2][3] too... that program(I say program because it's basically full git well done) is phenomenal.

hit me up on the gitter.im channel for spacemacs if you have questions on it or emacs.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKF41ivkBb0 (basics of spacemacs... also check out his channel for a complete dive into each of the prefixes and how to use them)

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQO7F2Q9DwA (basics of magit)

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtliRYQd0j4 (more advanced features of magit like rebasing interactively and easily.)

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