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Comment by cole-k | Hacker News Reader

I'm always envious of people who have vim/emacs setups that appear so clean and functional.

I just think to my cobbled-together vim setup which both had a long startup and was riddled with idiosyncrasies (both I'm sure caused by my own misconfiguration).

I since have migrated to spacemacs, thinking that I could let people more competent than I do the brunt of configuration, but still I have managed to make the startup long and the experience janky.

I guess I should either spend more or less time configuring my setups...

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I'm the same in desiring a preconfigured setup. I think it's similar with how I like the same thing but for a tiling window manager like i3/sway. I suspect there might be a fair few who still prefer the vim or emacs environment that want a preconfigured setup with a basic level of configuration, as is commonly offered by a desktop environment.

I like leaving the configuration to someone who I know has a better understanding of all the offerings. I realise this may not appeal to someone who has strong opinions or similar level of understanding as these maintainers however.

I might mention, if you hadn't already been aware of it, that SpaceVim exists as well. I really like the concept of layers, the bundling of packages for different features for basic/simple configuration (both SpaceVim/Emacs have this).

Usually what happens when I try a text editor, shell, etc. is that I'm happy with 95% of the features but there are a few things that nag at me. And inevitably I go down a rabbit hole of hacks until I end up with (an approximation of) my desired feature. If I do that enough times then something ends up wonky until my whole setup is kinda scuffed.

As an example pertinent to this post, I repeatedly have to dismiss notifications from pdflatex about some sort of incompatibility with my setup. I think it's relative line numbering, I'm not sure though. My attempts to fix it have only resulted in pdf files occasionally opening as raw code.

I will take a look at SpaceVim, though. I've been using vanilla vim for a while to edit personal stuff because I don't want to open spacemacs...

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