I highly recommend running in develop

Master is really old, and has more issues in my experience

I don't symlink

And I never used spacemacs-base

Thanks, that's helpful to know 🙌

i recently switched to develop - i've had no issues

I run develop, very few issues major issues that aren't noted or talked about on #spacemacs

a) use develop it is ironically more stable. most of the time when things break, they break because of upstream issues - package author (who doesn’t use Spacemacs) would update something, that breaks it. Spacemacs devs are usually quick to patch it up so it works with the updated version Currently Spacemacs maintainers are trying to release next version, so more stable and polished update is coming to master soon. But right now I’d suggest develop b) If you have never used Spacemacs before, I would recommend using default distro first, not base c) Spacemacs allows to have its config file in different locations (if that’s why you are trying to symlink) https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/20342/how-do-i-specify-a-different-folder-for-spacemacs-file

@U0G75ARHC (et al) thanks for all the notes, I'll give it another try again later today

no problem. please feel free to ask questions there’s #spacemacs here, there’s also spacemacs gitter channel (which gets really crowded at times)

I also post Spacemacs and Emacs tips here https://twitter.com/ilemming people find them useful

Although there will be a new release soon, all the bug fixes are available on develop much sooner. I've used develop for the last two years. I tried spacemacs-base on develop recently and its just too minimal. It was enlightening to see how many features of the full distribution I am using. I have a .spacemacs.d directory in the root of my home directory for additional files (snippets, layouts, etc)

I also have free book on how I use Spacemacs with Clojure, its work in progress, but has some useful configurations https://practicalli.github.io/spacemacs/

Also, personally, I prefer to use Spacemacs in Holy mode and with Ivy instead of Helm. Ivy is much more responsive for me. And I found that Holy mode allows you to learn more about Emacs more so then Evil. Unless your appeal is VIM bindings. Spacemacs is also an awesome Holy Emacs config, which adds quite a lot of value.

@U05254DQM Also great job on that guide! I shared it with my team

@U0K064KQV thanks, I picked ivy the first time but it seems like that choice was removed the in develop?

@U050TNB9F add ivy as a layer entry in dotspacemacs-configuration-layers section of your .spacemacs and ivy will replace helm as the default completion framework. There are some variables you can configure on the Ivy layer in this readme http://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+completion/ivy/README.html

Thanks for all the tips, I think I might have arrived at something that works for me! 🙂

The discoverability with SPC is really nice

i ended up with holy-mode and alt-SPC for the menu

@U0524B4UW not the wisest choice since M-SPC is important binding that reveals some nice transients, e.g. it works in any Helm buffer (I think Ivy has the similar thing), in Org-agenda it opens enormously helpful one.

@U0G75ARHC Those can also be opened with S M Spc

So I think it's actually a pretty good choice. Even though I personally stick to the default M m binding and just got used to it.

ah, okay then. I’m trying to think other places where M-SPC|`S-M-SPC` works in Spacemacs

I think because Gnome default to using M SPC, most of Emacs and Spacemacs bindings have avoided using that binding. And I'm pretty sure that's why Spacemacs also binds S M SPC for things that use M SPC

but do you know any other things besides org-agenda and helm/ivy buffers where that binding is used?

Nope, those were the only two and I learned it from your Twitter 😋👍

I'm guessing maybe when the ? is needed to be typed. Then the transient states goes to M Spc ?

Most other layers have ? bound to the transient state

See https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/develop/doc/CONVENTIONS.org#transient-state

It's weird though, because I've seen ? used a lot more

Or . as well

I symlink --- I keep my dotfiles in one system directory and symlink them to where they need to be. It is not perfect, because I'm sometimes unclear on what wants to be symlinked in $HOME vs in $HOME/.config or whatever

i haven't had any problems, once I twiddled my .spacemacs (rather, my spacemacs.symlink) to get version control to follow symlinks

Most of the time when things break, they break due to upstream issues - someone (who unaware of Spacemacs) updates their package, the contract gets broken. Or, spacemacs maintainers update the way how it works with a third-party package (because it was updated), that requires package to be updated on your machine, but you have no clue. You can’t simply have over 300 packages with bunch of strings attached to them and hope that they’d “play nicely with each other”. One thing I learned early on - you need to be able to triage what’s breaking and decide if you need that thing, if not - then simply remove it from your system. If you need it - then find a workaround and create an issue, most of the time there’s already an issue on github and someone would post a workaround. In my experience (I’ve been using Spacemacs for a few years now) it let me down only handful of times and it took me no longer than 10-20 minutes to figure out a workaround

> I disagree with some of the layer choices they’ve made then roll your own layers. It is not as hard as it looks. You can even make layers based on “official” layers. e.g. : https://github.com/agzam/dot-spacemacs/tree/master/layers/ag-clojure

always a possibility