
Spacemacs 0.105.0 released - psibi
https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/releases/tag/v0.105.0
======
jcoffland
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.

~~~
DannoHung
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).

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

~~~
broodbucket
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.

------
shadeless
Also a great addition is the new Spacemacs website which went live today:
[http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

~~~
JoshMnem
I love Spacemacs, but the old site looked better. Why all the animation? It's
like the Web is devolving back to how it was when it was covered in animated
gifs, marquee, and blink elements. Animation doesn't catch my attention -- it
makes me want to close the page.

~~~
outworlder
Perhaps you are not the intended audience, then?

~~~
JoshMnem
Like I said, I love Spacemacs. I just don't like animation for animation's
sake. It's the modern equivalent of blink and marquee elements. Just saying
that I like the old site better.

------
jacobmoe
People like to say that emacs isn't an editor but a platform, or just a lisp
interpreter that comes with text editing libraries. But is it? The emacs
development team sees it as a text editor, I think. If it was just an
interpreter, I can imagine many editors built on top of it, with spacemacs
being just one. If it's an editor, than wouldn't you expect the good ideas
from projects like spacemacs to make its way into the emacs core? I wonder if
the emacs core team should go all in with the emacs-as-a-platform idea and
focus on just the core features, letting projects like spacemacs to create an
appealing editor.

~~~
ambulancechaser
well, that's kinda been the way emacs has been for a while now. They recently
added a really easy package managing system which allows for emacs to look and
behave drastically different from each other. About making its way into the
core, the dev team won't really put anything into the core unless other things
in the core require them.

Getting the dev email list to agree to a change of something that is easily
added through packages or just init.el/emacs.d/ is difficult if not
impossible. But this is a good thing: opinionated workflows are adaptable but
not forced on seasoned veterans and newbies alike. Getting good packages into
elpa or tasteful additions into core that augment emacs is always welcomed it
seems.

Join the development list and just follow discussions. It's always fun to see
really smart people talking about new code, extensions, opinions, and the new
maintainer John seems to want to do a good job and produce some nice software.
I've got it going to my gmail under a label and never filling my inbox so it
gives a nice reading break every now and then at work.

------
jasonjackson
I love Spacemacs, I'm a total convert I barely ever use vim now -- best of
both worlds.

~~~
xutopia
Which both worlds?

~~~
aban
The extensibility of Emacs, along with Vi[m] key bindings.

Although Spacemacs does have a "Holy mode" which will keep the Emacs bindings
and won't use vim-like keys.

------
fizixer
Slightly off-topic. I'm looking for a tutorial/article/project to create a toy
(or even feature-full) emacs-like text editor from the ground up.

Using two languages: C and scheme (preferably R7RS-small).

I have quite a few resources to create a vi/vim like editor from scratch (vis,
some python projects, etc) but non in the scheme+C arena along emacs lines.

Emacs project itself is a bad example of studying the architecture of such an
editor because of its humongous codebase (~250 kloc C, ~1.2 Mloc e-lisp)
unless someone has done a good write-up about how to get familiar with
architecture and extensibility infrastructure.

~~~
aban
I haven't seen any tutorials for writing an emacs-like editor, but I think
studying the source of QEmacs [0] and mg [1] is a good starting point.

[0]: [http://bellard.org/qemacs/](http://bellard.org/qemacs/)

[1]:
[http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/](http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/)

Also, you could take a look at these:

[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations)

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Emacs/Emacs-
like_editor...](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Emacs/Emacs-like_editors)

[http://texteditors.org/cgi-
bin/wiki.pl?EmacsFamily](http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EmacsFamily)

------
Naomarik
Been using this for a few months now and this configuration of emacs has made
coding and note taking a pleasure.

------
iLemming
Spacemacs is awesome! Anyone who still using Vim should at least try it.

------
ubercow
1.2 What is the official pronunciation of Spacemacs?

As it is written, that is space then macs.

I was wrong this whole time. I always pronounced it like "space emacs" or
"spacey-macs" if you will.

~~~
michaelhoffman
I pronounce it _spuh-CHEE-max_ , like the pronunciation of Dr. Spaceman's name
on _30 Rock_.

~~~
jasonkostempski
First thing I thought of, took me too long to find the reference:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wQbKAAfCCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wQbKAAfCCY)

------
jophde
Easily the best editor going imo.

~~~
pzone
If it were just an editor I would agree, but the #1 killer app, org-mode, puts
it in a different class of application.

------
codygman
For me Spacemacs is perfect:

7~ years using vim 4 years using emacs

enjoyed modal editing in vim, got very good with it enjoyed how easy it was to
program/debug emacs tried setting up evil, wasn't up to the task of
configuring it

With both Emacs and Vim I had trouble having to upgrade my configs too often,
but that's not necessarily their fault.

It could just be a coincidence of timing, but Spacemacs gives me most of what
I want by default and makes it easy for me to customize.

I will say that the Emacs graphic rendering bug which causes pathologically
bad performance on long lines has been biting me a lot using Spacemacs to do
Golang development.

------
davidw
A colleague is using it and I had a look, but it seems kind of weird because
it doesn't seem like Emacs any more to the point where I couldn't easily do
Emacs stuff with it.

I've been using regular old Emacs for about 20 years. For those more familiar
with Spacemacs, how hard is it to accomplish some of what it does, or
transition to a more normal Emacs setup once you get to like Emacs?

 _Edit_ \- this is just out of curiosity. I hope to use Emacs for another 20
years at least :-)

~~~
jambo
I think you can now configure it to run in "holy mode". In both modes you can
still type meta-x (also via `<space>:`).

I think if you had a very customized emacs setup, you'd have to put some
effort organizing it into custom "layers", which is how spacemacs organizes
its config and making sure you don't have big conflicts in mapped keys.

~~~
cmiles74
IMHO, the layers are pretty easy to put together if you're comfortable with
your Emacs configuration. The first one I coded up (for notmuch) was done
inside an hour and that's when I was new to Spacemacs.

------
gcao
How well does Spacemacs work in a terminal (e.g. iTerm)? I've been using
iTerm+Tmux+vim and don't want to give up iTerm+tmux just yet.

~~~
elliotec
It works great. I use the same setup, and was big into spacemacs and even
contributed to it but ended up right back at iterm + tmux + vim again. Vim is
faster, and suits my needs better.

~~~
DannoHung
When you say faster: Did you try starting emacs in daemon mode and connecting
to it with emacsclient?

I still kinda miss vim -p (and I am not a huge fan of eyebrowse as a
replacement for vim's tabs), but that very much solved the speed issue for me.

~~~
elliotec
I don't think I ever did that. Maybe I'll give it a shot, thanks.

------
piotrrojek
I don't have any experience in neither Vim, nor Emacs. Should I try it? Looks
awesome. Also - is there any way to add Go (golang) support?

~~~
nilkn
I personally would find spacemacs very overwhelming if I didn't have prior
experience with either vim or emacs. My recommendation is to pick one of the
two, use it for a while and get some experience, and then consider spacemacs.

~~~
leppr
Just wanted to reiterate this. When I started with Spacemacs I had a few years
of using and customizing Vim under my belt, yet I still found it very daunting
at the beginning.

The main problem is customization. Even though Emacs Lisp and the Emacs
ecosystem allows for a more organized and advanced setup, there are so many
options to do any single thing.

Add to that the newbie-unfriendly documentation, you end up spending way too
much time trying to understand how to customize things properly, or at all.
Whereas with Vim, if I had a simple customization idea, I would just google
it, find a solution in 2 minutes and slap a few more lines in my 1k LoC
.vimrc.

------
platz
everyone talks about spacemacs=vim. this is nice, but what turned me off of
spacemacs was the layers config abstractions. It breaks the normal
configuration of emacs.

Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.

~~~
rhaps0dy
>Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.

Yes. However one of the most attractive features of spacemacs is... that
somebody has selected the packages and installed them for you! You don't have
to do anything!

~~~
platz
.. and you're stuck forever in the spacemacs layers abstraction, per my
comment above. (Try installing a package from Melpa)

~~~
pixel_fcker
It takes literally 5 minutes to add a layer that will install whatever package
you want.

------
oneeyedpigeon
I feel like the author missed a golden opportunity to call this Vimacs ...

~~~
michaelhoffman
That already exists. It's Emacs bindings for Vim.

[http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=300](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=300)

~~~
dilap
whyyyy would you do that?? i say that as a devoted emacs addict!

------
eruditely
This is really cool, I've been using bbatsov's one and I'm going to try this.
One thing I _really_ suggest is installing the seethru plugin here's a
screenshot, it makes emacs transparent.

[http://imgur.com/DUCv2UK](http://imgur.com/DUCv2UK)

I also use webstorm 11 as my emacs skill is insufficient to graduate to
apprentice neckbeard. my apologies.

~~~
StreakyCobra
Try `SPC T T`

~~~
eruditely
What does SPC translate to in holy mode?

~~~
syl20bnr
It is by default `M-m`.

------
StreakyCobra
Come to the dark side of Emacs. We have cookies.

------
shriphani
I used spacemacs for a bit a few months ago but launch-times were really long.
I use emacs as my default editor and I really hated the bootstrapping process
when I fired up emacs to edit a config from the command line.

If someone has a simple fix to this problem I would gladly use it since they
seemed to have the right ingredients for a top notch experience.

~~~
packetslave
emacs --daemon and EDITOR='emacsclient'

~~~
leppr

        alias emacs="emacsclient -nw -a ''"
    

is the best I've found.

 _-nw_ : Open a new frame in current terminal (otherwise it just opens the
file in whatever other emacs window you already have launched).

 _-a_ : Start the daemon if it isn't running.

 _' '_: Little trick so you can launch it without a filename.

~~~
philsnow

        -a: Start the daemon if it isn't running.
        '': Little trick so you can launch it without a filename.
    

Ha, if only. From the bit on `-a` in
[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/em...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/emacsclient-
Options.html) :

    
    
        Specify a command to run if emacsclient fails to contact Emacs. This is useful when running emacsclient in a script.
        As a special exception, if command is the empty string, then emacsclient starts Emacs in daemon mode (as emacs --daemon) and then tries connecting again.
    

`emacsclient -a vim` will run vim if it can't connect to a running daemon.

------
trevorhartman
All the links in the docs TOC are broken:
[https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUME...](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUMENTATION.org)

~~~
StreakyCobra
We know, we have a problem generating links that work both with our new online
documentation system and github (syntax incompatibility). For now you have to
use
[http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html](http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html)
:-)

------
human_error
I tried it for couple of weeks but returned back to emacs. It has some cool
features but I couldn't get used to its keybindings. I'm sure they're
customizable but I wasn't motivated enough to do so.

~~~
gnuvince
Same for me. Cool package if it floats your boat, but it's not what I look for
in an editor, especially the "crowd configured" part.

------
cant_kant
Basically viper in sheep's clothing.

