D & Nim (especially Nim) are very appealing from a language perspective, but the lack an IDE undermines the advantages they bring.
I personally won't consider using a language for a meaningful project unless it has a decent debugger, and reasonable refactoring; ie. at least find references & rename.
Beef is building on an IDE, which is a refreshing take, but it's still too early.
Using that .spacemacs file you should be able to launch a fully prepped for D! The only other dependencies are a D compiler and DCD (https://github.com/dlang-community/DCD) built and in your PATH. I'd be happy to answer any questions if something doesn't work.
Other IDEs with a languageserver implementation can make use of DLS https://github.com/d-language-server/dls. VSCode and sublime are two I've had good success with.. but I always end up back with emacs ;)
As for a debugger, you can debug any D program with GDB/LLDB (depending on if you compile with dmd/lcd). Then you can use any graphical debugger that uses gdb. Nemiver is my favorite, then there's a few web based ones that are nice: https://www.gdbgui.com/
Also had really good luck doing D with Spacemacs, but Spacemacs is a hit or miss to setup for me. Other times I just use Sublime Text for the syntax highlighting.
I can't remember what I used for Nim, I think I either used Nano or vim just because I've only tested it once or twice. I havent used it heavily yet, though I do have an interest in Nim, since I do enjoy Python programming.
My own pet peeve about D is the lack of local documentation. If I install my system's compiler packages¹ I receive basically no documentation at all. That is a huge difference to the experience with nim/rustc/go/$others which all provide a nice fat $lang-doc package in their Suggests field, and all of those contain full standard library docs/tutorials/etc.
1. gdc or ldc on Debian. The experience /may/ be different with the dmd repositories, but being external they're of less interest to me.
D comes with an interesting utility called `dman`. Run it from the command line and as an argument give it a D topic and it'll open a browser on the topic.
dman dman
will, of course, open the browser on a page about dman.
Which, as I noted, is still a very different experience from go/nim/rust in Debian. It wasn't a pet peeve about no documentation, it is about how I can interact with it compared to to other languages.
Which leads me to wonder why we don't have dmd{,-doc} in Debian now, given it has been ~3 years since the compiler was open sourced. I can't even find an ITP in a quick search :/
Nim works very well with Emacs and Visual Studio Code at the very least, also Vim (from reports by others) - including debug support. What are you missing?
it should work on nim source level as well: if there are any problems ,that's a bug,so please report it. (disclaimer: me & my partner also work on a bit more advanced commercial debugger environment which also targets nim, so I guess there are many kinds of efforts)
VisualD is pretty damn good, visual code has a few D plugins that are ok to excellent when they work (which is most of the time)
There is also a D specific IDE which I can't remember the name of which is probably best if you just want something that works (it's pretty lightweight)
I personally won't consider using a language for a meaningful project unless it has a decent debugger, and reasonable refactoring; ie. at least find references & rename.
Beef is building on an IDE, which is a refreshing take, but it's still too early.