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#emacs
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2020-01-13
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Juliano Pereira Lima14:01:31

Hi folks. Has anyone used Spacemacs? have any feedback?

practicalli-johnny14:01:15

Yes, I have used Spacemacs for Clojure development for over 3 years now. It's really increased my productivity. It also stopped me wasting days and weeks (years) massaging my init.el file. There is very little config needed thanks to the layers, actually you can get Spacemacs to do it all as it will prompt you to add layers when you open certain file types. You can of course customise Spacemacs as much as you want. Another great thing is the community of contributors to Spacemacs (I am one too). As it's a community effort, then you get to use lots of other people's skills. I have used one person's config previously, but that does risk them abandoning the project. There is also a #spacemacs channel here and I also am writing a book (with Screencasts) on Clojure development with Spacemacs https://practicalli.github.io/spacemacs/ The most important advice, use the Spacemacs develop branch rather than the default master branch. develop is very stable and has been for the last 2 years or more.

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lispyclouds14:01:19

@deleted-user Do you use paredit when editing lispy stuff with Doom? I couldnt get it to work as nicely as spacemacs and still using it as I found doing clojure on spacemacs involves less config than Doom.

lispyclouds14:01:58

Can you share your clojure config maybe? I can give Doom another try then! 😄

lispyclouds14:01:24

I do wanna switch for the reasons you mentioned above

lispyclouds14:01:42

its just that the keybindings are more semantic and i guess im too used to them

Nir Rubinstein14:01:24

Isn’t slurp/barf just < or > on the opening /closing? Or is it evil-cleverparens?

Nir Rubinstein14:01:12

I have both enabled, but I guess I’m only using the cleverparens bindings (also using doom emacs myself)

lispyclouds14:01:46

I've used more of evil-smartparens which is default in spacemacs i guess

practicalli-johnny14:01:15

Yes, I have used Spacemacs for Clojure development for over 3 years now. It's really increased my productivity. It also stopped me wasting days and weeks (years) massaging my init.el file. There is very little config needed thanks to the layers, actually you can get Spacemacs to do it all as it will prompt you to add layers when you open certain file types. You can of course customise Spacemacs as much as you want. Another great thing is the community of contributors to Spacemacs (I am one too). As it's a community effort, then you get to use lots of other people's skills. I have used one person's config previously, but that does risk them abandoning the project. There is also a #spacemacs channel here and I also am writing a book (with Screencasts) on Clojure development with Spacemacs https://practicalli.github.io/spacemacs/ The most important advice, use the Spacemacs develop branch rather than the default master branch. develop is very stable and has been for the last 2 years or more.

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ag18:01:19

> it’s good but doom emacs is better imo Spacemacs community is huge (in relative terms). And they keep adding/improving things all the time. That means that things do break from time to time. But that doesn’t mean that Spacemacs is unstable. You absolutely can make your config stable and solid and upgrade with no fear. You just need to follow a few rules, the rules you should follow with any kind of configuration, be that Prelude, Doom, Spacemacs or anything else - you need to be cognizant about what you’re adding to it. Don’t add layers and packages without first studying them, learn what layer includes, see if you need those packages, ignore those that you won’t be using, avoid the bloat, minimize conflicts. I currently have over 300 packages installed. In the past three years I had only two or three times when after pulling the latest of Spacemacs things broke and it took me longer than ten minutes to figure out what the heck. Most of the time things break because of some upstream change - when a package that has some tighter integration gets an update. That’s not Spacemacs’s fault, but it needs to be fixed for that package. Exactly because of that it is recommended to use develop branch of Spacemacs, because things like that get fixed very fast. If you’re not using Spacemacs, you may feel FOMOed. With Spacemacs sometimes you may feel overwhelmed.

ag18:01:35

Overall - I’d recommend anyone (beginner or an Emacs-Jedi) to at least try Spacemacs. For a beginner it increases visibility of things - hidden gems of Emacs are there on the surface, waiting for you to be discovered. For a seasoned Emacsen it offers a lot of good stuff as well.

sogaiu19:01:50

i haven't used doom emacs as much as Nate Sutton, but so far my experience has been similar (i tried spacemacs first -- more than once). the doom maintainer was also helpful when i got stuck initially. i agree in general it's worth trying both though. what i did find helpful was plexus' chemacs -- that allowed me to use more than one version of emacs, so i could fall back on what i was more comfortable with.

Jcaw20:01:23

Doom seems significantly better written than Spacemacs.

Jcaw20:01:11

Spacemacs is horribly bloated with weird abstractions and indirections, and it's concrete.

Jcaw20:01:48

I think the long-term prognosis for Doom is way better.

deleted20:01:03

I do think that spacemacs has better mnemonics, though

Jcaw20:01:09

Do you know how good the Spacemacs keybind ports are?

Jcaw20:01:33

I'm definitely tempted to just wipe all the keybinds full stop and only bind commands I use often, but I don't want to lose the discoverability

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Jcaw20:01:42

Yeah that's the issue. I'd like to discard the cruft so I can make everything shorter and reduce the surface area I have to think about, but I don't want to have to chase rabbits.

Jcaw20:01:18

This is the diff I needed to expose the 'visual line numbers option that was added to native Emacs. In a normal init file, this would be one line, (setq display-line-numbers 'visual), I had to navigate through 4-5 levels of indirection and basically restate Emacs' own documentation to get it merged. Totalled +58 -15 https://github.com/jcaw/spacemacs/commit/8cda80854948d888958f7742adb029973ba34775?diff=split

Jcaw20:01:43

So... I think Spacemacs is doomed

Jcaw20:01:46

No pun intended

Jcaw20:01:58

I say this while still using Spacemacs lol. I'd like to switch to Doom at some point.