i must have two versions of firefox installed. lovely.

I used the search layer and set it to chrome. Better then what i had.

It's also possible that you have your own firefox profile. I use profiles on chrome to have completely different "user sessions" but only one system installation.

could you use this? https://github.com/emacsmirror/cfn-mode

otherwise it looks like this spacemacs config from a while back sets up cfn-mode using the method you linked to https://gist.github.com/bleggett/89d288e370284ec083d7eb324253a4ef

personally I prefer using packages that already have that set up

it looks like this supports quite a bit https://github.com/emacsmirror/cfn-mode/blob/master/cfn-mode/cfn-mode.el

Thanks cora. Do you understand the configuration in cfn-mode? it just says this (flycheck-cfn-setup) . I think the author assumes i know something i don't.

I think you'd need to (require 'flycheck-cfn) and then run that

i don't remember how spacemacs does custom packages, and how it handles running code after the package loads, but that's where to look

gotcha. thanks again.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/cfn-mode/blob/master/flycheck-cfn/flycheck-cfn.el#L107

maybe you just need to run that function and auto loads handles the rest?