@sam16 - I'm no elisp hacker, but both of those approaches look reasonable to me. The second one is probably what I'd be inclined to, given that it's shorter. Do they not work? What errors do you see related to their use (presumably in the *Messages* buffer)? Can you evaluate those expressions (maybe changing setq-default to setq) after startup time to debug and iterate?

@tomayerst - I don't sorry. I've gotten used to the evil-lisp-state (or whatever it is that ships with spacemacs under the SPC k menu) and haven't messed around with alternatives.

seconding this ^ the spacemacs evil lisp state has proven to be the move effective tool for managing lisps in spacemacs for me.

when writing in org mode, does anyone know of a way to get the text under a heading to be appropriately spaced over?

If you start the top line with some space, a lot of times the rest of the lines will follow suit. E.g. with lists. But I don't know how to always do that.

There was some way to indent everything visually without changing the file contents, but I'm forgetting how. Let me see if I can look that up.

Ah, try this: M-x org-indent-mode. From here: https://orgmode.org/manual/Clean-view.html

@alexkeyes do this

(evil-define-key 'insert org-mode-map (kbd "RET") 'org-return-indent)

@ag Thanks! My org mode files will always look good