Enter Spacemacs!
04 Dec 2016It has been a great while since the last time I put up a blog post. I can’t say I have particularly good reason for this, part from trying to spend enough time studying for my last exam, which hopefully went well enough so that I soon can call myself an engineer 
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Now on to the good stuff: I have to come to make a decision that may well impact my career as a developer! Nope, just kidding. I’ve decided to try out Spacemacs!. But what happened to Atom, you might ask? Nothing happened to Atom, I just figured I’d give something else a try. I rely heavily on plugins like vim-mode, so I figured: Why not use an editor where vim editing is a first-class citizen?
#editorwars
I also thought it would prove a useful experience to have my hand with Emacs. The eternal “Vi vs Emacs” war has been something that really has been that interesting to me, but I’ve heard stories from a whole lot of people having strong opinions regarding one of the two. Myself, I’ve been using Vim pretty much just for editing commit messages and while poking around at servers over SSH. I was not tied to my dotfile for this usage whatsoever, neither I using my dotfiles very extensively when configuring Atom. I figured there was not much for me to lose to try my hand with Spacemacs.
First steps -> spacing out(!)
The name Spacemacs comes from the fact that you end up pressing the spacebar A LOT. Both emacs and vim operate with a type of “leader key”, which is the key you press, then release, followed by a sequence of key to perform some action. Traditionally in emacs, this “leader key” combination has been C-x, i.e. Ctrl-x, but this cumbersome to type, and has lead to a number of hardcore emacs users RSI. For this reason, by default, Spacemacs uses Space as the leader key, allowing for swift access to to the most commonly used commands known from both vim and emacs. It also features the full power of the Emacs Lisp platform, but I have yet to delve properly into its depths. I’ve only heard the legends so far! 
Is it worth it, then?
You may be wondering whether this “hassle” to learn using a new editor is really worth it. To be honest, I’m probably not the best person to ask about the matter lol, but I found Spacemacs easy to learn, especially if you have some experience in using vim. But whatever floats your boat: If you’re one of those wizards out there with a super-mega-ultra-awesome vim configuration, take pride in it and keep using it. But if you’re not particularly tied to your config, like yours truly, I recommend you at least give Spacemacs a try.
Until next time, happy coding! 