Dec 23, 2016

Trying Out Spacemacs

I’ve been on the hunt for solid IDE-like plaintext editors for a while now. In being a software engineer for both hobby and career, I’ve had my share of RSI, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve become mouse-phobic and have been looking for an editor that better enables that. My search has come to a pause on Spacemacs.

Here’s what it looks like. I’m editing a configuration file (top left), the source code that uses it (top right), a console window for the project (bottom left), and a git interface known as magit (bottom right).

Spacemacs is an unholy child of Emacs and Vim. As someone with minimal Vim experience, and being largely concerned with usability on both sides of the holy war, this was a weird choice. Turns out, it’s a completely different beast from both Emacs and Vim. It’s both and neither at the same time. Technically speaking, it’s a configuration framework for Emacs, but it really feels like a completely different editor. I find its most attractive features lie outside the Emacs/Vim intersection. It’s in the “Space” part of Spacemacs. It’s the Vim leader-key being moved to the spacebar and kicked into overdrive.

This is definitely a hipster’s editor. New, irreverent, and niche. I guess it’s time to put on the wide-rimmed glasses and scarf I don’t own.

So far, here are my favorite things.

• Clean and modern looking - no UI fluff and a very nice default theme.
• Highly extensible - there are tons of layers you can install to streamline your development and tune the editor to your needs.
• As you may have guessed, almost everything can be delegated to the spacebar as an entrypoint.
• Excellent window and file management. It took some getting used to conceptually (not having tabs), but I’m in love with it now.
• It’s well-documented and in many ways self-documenting. This was a big deal for me as a learner.
• Jumping around the contents of project files is incredible. Helm swoop, avy, and snipe are an impressive tag-team.
• Automatically considers repositories as projects and integrates with Makefiles.

So far, this has been the most comfortable keyboard-focused plaintext editor I’ve tried. It’s not perfect, but it’s well on it’s way. Try exploring it for a couple weeks. It has a lot of features to experiment with.

It’s still a very young project, but it already has a large and active contributor base. Still, it’s technically in beta. I’ve had some freezes and crashes, but I’ve never lost work as a result. One big thing that bugs me is that it’s still not quite an IDE. Autocompletion and multi-edit just don’t work as one might expect if you’re coming from a robust IDE like Visual Studio. If I could port Resharper’s features to Spacemacs, I’d be set for life. If only…