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Comment by silasdb | Hacker News Reader

After years using vim and variations (vis), I decided to give Emacs another try, this time using Spacemacs.

I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org) as a very good alternative for vim users that want to learn Emacs. I'm very satisfied with it, although it is slow to start, but I'm going to try Emacs server/client that I just heard about in this discussion.

Have anybody tried Spacemacs?

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I tried it, but Doom Emacs is the better alternative. Spacemacs ways too bloat and configuring it is a big pain. I think it still does everything Spacemacs capable of

> Spacemacs ways too bloat and configuring it is a big pain.

Doom is just as bloated and a pain to config.

> Have anybody tried Spacemacs?

Yes.

Spacemacs is awesome. It was what allowed me to switch 100% to using Emacs.

The amount of time necessary to devote to being proficient in Emacs is significant. When you have to figure out how to re-wire Emacs and all the various extensions you want to use to use Evil (with consistent bindings) is even more.

Spacemacs allowed me to benefit from the work that others have done in these regards significantly.

However I recently switch over to Doom-Emacs. Which is very much like Spacemacs, but faster and easier to customize.

I strongly recommend that people trying out Emacs that do NOT want to give up Vi/Vim/NeoVim bindings to check out Doom-Emacs. It is the shit. It is very very good. Not nearly as quick as NeoVim, but it's worlds better then it used to be. And pretty attractive as far as text-oriented applications go.

Native Comp + Doom-Emacs + Native Wayland GTK + Nerd Fonts = Best damn operating system ever invented. So far. And it comes with a really good editor, too.

> When you have to figure out how to re-wire Emacs and all the various extensions you want to use to use Evil (with consistent bindings) is even more.

evil-collection actually makes this quite easy now. So if you want to roll your own Emacs config from scratch with vim keybindings, it's about as easy doing it with Emacs keybindings. It wasn't a thing when Spacemacs or Doom got started, though.

I wanted to use org mode hence started using eMacs. I tried the ‘vanilla emacs’ which didn’t click for me (spent time in the tutorial etc.) Then I found spacemacs (and evil mode!) and that helped (as I have some vi experience!)

I have been spending a lot of time with Dawes Wilsons ‘SystemCrafters’ YT live sessions and other vlogs - that’s an awesome source for emacs (and more) knowledge, highly recommended!!!)

So now I’m finally crawling in emacs (org for note-taking and being the main driver, and magit soon to come…)

I think the tide has turned in favour of doom emacs, which was heavily inspired by spacemacs.

I think that's basically true, but there are still many of us using and contributing to Spacemacs. It comes with a bit more out of the box than does Doom.

I tried Spacemacs and was fairly happy other than the performance. Scrolling and even auto-indent were visibility slowing down my typing. It depended on the language but Rust, which is probably my most common language, was distinctly bad.

The performance lag of Spacemacs was addressed by Doom Emacs ( https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ). Have you tried Doom Emacs by any chance. After syncing everything, the performance is stellar in my opinion.

Spacemacs is bloated and changes too many things (keymaps, etc) wrt to the original configuration (at least a couple years ago when I tried it). Doom emacs is the way to go if you don't want to spend time rolling your own configuration from scratch.

I tried once, but there seems to be something wrong with their download. It is just a bunch of config files without an executable. Gave up and went back to vim. People joke about not being able to exit vim, but I couldn't even start spacemacs.

> It is just a bunch of config files without an executable.

Exactly right. It's assumed that you have emacs installed separately. From the spacemacs repo...

> Spacemacs is an extension of a popular text editor called Emacs. Thus you need to first install base Emacs and then download the Spacemacs extension files with Git.

Give it another try! You might like it.

3.0 has been in the works for years but doesn't look like it will ever see the light of day.

Everyone just runs develop, rolling release style. They finally switched the default branch a little while back.

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