Comment by Phlogistique | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Phlogistique | Hacker News Reader

I tried to use it to switch to Emacs, and was disappointed like each time I try to switch to Emacs.

Among the problems and warts:

- The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md)

- Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs

- I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo"

- In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs.

- I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth.

- The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this.

If there were just one or two of these warts and inconveniences, I would get use to them or fix them, but right now there are a little too much. That said, the premise is really attractive, so I can only hope these problems will get fixed over the years so that I can go back to it someday.

> - The Spacemacs doc is on their repo, not in Emacs! (except if you manually fire a buffer with SPC f f ~/.emacs.d/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md)

You can explore the doc for each layer by "SPC f e h". You can even jump to source from there.

> - Emacs has an interactive interface for editing configuration variables. You will arrive to this interface from the Emacs doc, but it does not have Spacemacs-like keybindings and I'm not even sure it's supposed to work with Spacemacs

Everything that works in stock Emacs should work in Spacemacs. Stock Emacs key bindings are always there. Spacemacs stuff, as its name implies, is in the SPC key.

> - I could not find the doc for ex/vim commands. I suspect there is no equivalent to ":h :foo"

I think it should exist. Maybe you need to ask the gitter chatroom. Stuffs like s/foo/bar works for me. However, even NeoVim wants to remove it: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089

> - In vim, it is possible from any mode to get back to the normal mode by typing 'ESC'. In Emacs, C-g aborts a keybinding. However those two are not unified by Spacemacs.

You do it with evil-escape: https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-escape, which is built-in Spacemacs by default and press "fd to escape everything. You can change it to anything you want.

> - I use vim with several buffers. However launching "emacsclient -t foo.txt bar.txt" will open them sequentially, and I can not use :n / :N to go back and forth.

The next version you can use "SPC b n" and "SPC b p" to go back and forth. However, you can use "SPC b s" to switch between buffers and press "C-c o" to open another window side by side. To split window, use "SPC b -" to create a window below and "SCP b /" to create a window right. Jump to each window based on the number on its modeline, i.e. "SPC 1" jumps to window 1, "SPC 2" to jump to window 2.

> - The fact that there are several interactive interfaces for switching buffers and/or opening files is confusing. Typing a file-name in helm-mini creates a "fundamental" buffer that is not a file. I lost some work because of this.

It's a feature. It means that when you switch to a non-existent buffer, you can press RET to create it. It's quite handy to create a scartch buffer of a specific major mode. If you want to open a file, don't use a command that open buffer but a command that open files. I believe in Vim I can create empty buffers.

Thanks a lot for all these answer! I will try Spacemacs once again.

> You can explore the doc for each layer by "SPC f e h". You can even jump to source from there.

But does it offer an access to the main docs? When I type "spacemacs" in there I get an empty README.md.

> Everything that works in stock Emacs should work in Spacemacs. Stock Emacs key bindings are always there

Yep, but I'm not an Emacs user so I do not know them!

> I think it should exist.

Well, you can try :h for yourself...

> However, even NeoVim wants to remove it: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1089

They are talking about removing Ex mode, not ex commands!

> I believe in Vim I can create empty buffers.

I don't believe in Vim you get an easy way to create a buffer that has a name that is not a filename...

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