Do you find that you still recommend Spacemacs to people new to Emacs? Although I still use it myself, I’ve gradually gotten less willing to recommend it. It seems semi-abandoned by the original creator; you pretty much have to stay on the develop branch, where it’s not uncommon for bugs to be introduced; key bindings often get changed out from under me when I update…

I really love Spacemacs in a lot of ways, but I find myself reluctant to put energy behind it. Would be really curious to hear your take on it.

In summary, I still recommend Spacemacs for people new to Emacs and will continue to do so. Having spent the last 5 days updating the book (with over 70 commits) then it's fair to say I still put energy into it. There are many maintainers for the Spacemacs project who the original maintainer delegated to after several years of work. There are regular updates to the Spacemacs project, so it is well maintained. There is only one branch, the develop branch, so there are no specific releases. Spacemacs is considered a defacto rolling release with a well maintained changeling. Bugs are mostly introduce by changes to the Emacs packages used, rather than Spacemacs itself. Spacemacs uses Melpa so packages are generated from source code on a daily basis. However, I still find that most bugs are fixed quickly or changes added to Spacemacs to manage package that break their API. Key bindings have rarely changed over the last 5 year and any changes are covered in the changlog. There is a well defined key bindings convention that the maintainers follow. I assume if a new layer is added, there could be some initial key bindings churn, but this should be minimized if the key bindings conventions are followed. There have been some minor corrections over the years where the convention wasn't sticky followed. The project isn't perfect and isn't a fit for everyone. Some people want to do far more customisation and if that isn't following the Spacemacs conventions then there is doom Emacs or several other configurations. If someone prefers the chorded key bindings of classic Emacs then I typically recommend Prelude. So I considered Spacemacs is a well maintained project that has a huge amount of features that are easy to add with little or no technical knowledge of Emacs and very little time to configure. I don't see a reason not to recommend this project, especially along with the Practically Spacemacs book and Configuration.

I do try other tools and there are some nice features in Neovim along with the Practically Neovim config. Although there is a big whole in functionality around a Magit style git client. I also try Doom Emacs occasionally and it may be the Clojure LSP UI support is a little more comprehensive with Doom than Spacemacs, but I always stumble on the usability of Doom due to the different choice of key bindings which slows me down. I will be trying Doom Emacs again today, specifically to compare the Clojure LSP experience with Spacemacs.

Thanks! I appreciate getting that input from someone who’s actually been pouring some time into evaluating it (which I definitely haven’t). And it’s good to hear that it’s still getting a fair amount of love. Doom is the main other one I periodically consider, but I haven’t been willing to make the switch as yet. > If someone prefers the chorded key bindings of classic Emacs then I typically recommend Prelude. Ohhhhh no, I’m evil 4 lyfe 😉 > Key bindings have rarely changed over the last 5 year and any changes are covered in the changlog. There is a well defined key bindings convention that the maintainers follow. eg there was a set of changes to the CIDER bindings a couple of years ago (at the point where , , was introduced as a binding for cider-jack-in). But yeah, my original statement of keybindings changing ‘often’ was really too strong. Your comment definitely updates me toward being happier with continuing on the spacemacs track; thank you!

There is an interesting comparison of Doom and Spacemacs on the Doom documentation site which seems to summarise quite succinctly the differences https://docs.doomemacs.org/latest/#/migrate/from-spacemacs In my own experiences people tend to adopt Spacemacs as its relatively quick and simple to get going. Some people grow out of Spacemacs or want to do more hacking or do not use all the features Spacemacs provides and want something simper / minimal. The advantage of Doom is that easier to configure in significantly different ways from the minimal base Doom config. The challenge is Doom will require more understanding of elisp and packages to configure. So in this respect Doom takes the user closer to the original Emacs ethos that you build your own highly tailored config and form your own workflows. This gives great power, although with that comes greater maintenance responsibility and time (and harder to share a setup with others).

> In my own experiences people tend to adopt Spacemacs as its relatively quick and simple to get going. That’s definitely my story; I was a lifelong vimmer before Spacemacs 🙂

I am the opposite, Spacemacs has made me a 'vimmer' - at least in terms of loving multi-modal editing... I am afraid vimscript is not on my todo list, although configuring Neovim with Fennel (a lisp) got my interest. Setting up Doom emacs feels closer to the several months I spent creating a configuration for Neovim (hopefully not as long as I probably wont need to hunt around for packages that I am not familiar with)

Yeah, vimscript’s pretty terrible. In a lot of ways I see Spacemacs as a better vim than vim, and the fact that it uses emacs lisp instead of vimscript is a substantial part of that.