Recently I decided to give Spacemacs a try. If you’ve not heard of Spacemacs, it’s a combination of Emacs and Vim with tons of ergonomical key bindings.

Things I really like about it so far include:

  1. That any Git repo automatically becomes a project
  2. The recent projects list / project switcher
  3. Fuzzy finding logic when opening a file in a project (I’m used to using fzf with Vim, so this has so far been a seemless replacement)
  4. The ease with which it kind of sets itself up for you when you open a file of a particular type (I opened a HTML file for the first time it offered to install the HTML layer which comes with emmet-mode and loads of useful key bindings)
  5. Org mode
  6. Key binding discovery :heart: Spacemacs key binding discovery

I’ve come across a few snags though:

  1. Org mode wouldn’t quite work out of the box. I had to exclude the org-projectile package, and ensure I was not using the built-in org mode.
  2. Keyboard shortcuts when using the shell layer are all kinds of messed up. I suspect it’s some sort of conflict between the Emacs shell commands and the Evil layer / commands and need to spend some time figuring out what’s what.

Time will tell whether I stick with Spacemacs, or revert back to Vim. So far though, so good.