I’ve recently started using spacemacs as my weapon of choice for non-iOS work. I must say, I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve seen my colleagues’ esoteric Haskell/Python Vim setups and walked away, disappointed in the fact that their setups weren’t even as polished as Xcode’s defaults (don’t @ me).
But I recently had to start writing code in elixir for a side project and came across this blog post: Spacemacs and Alchemist to make Elixir of immortality
Since then, I’ve been looking at spacemacs, going through their beginner’s guide(which is weirdly hidden on their website: Beginners tutorial) and generally spelunking around.
- The ecosystem. Xcode recently introduced SourceKit extensions (which are anemic in comparison), but this is an entire lisp OS by itself. What impressed me more than anything else was the depth of the tooling. With the right amount of configuration, spacemacs feels like an IDE builder platform rather than a text editor
- The spacemacs GUI app on macOS feels almost like a native app. ⌥ + key combos work in general, and I mouse scrolling feels inertial (it’s not perfect though)
- This little flair coming from a trackpad gesture: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/LimpingHardtofindCaudata-size_restricted.gif
- The text manipulation commands are plentiful, and sometimes really useful.
%in normal mode, for example takes you to the closing brace. I still miss Xcode’s brace highlights though
- Using h,j,k,l to navigate still feels weird. I’ll try remapping them to WASD or something at some point.
- Text selection is still weird and using the mouse actually copies text, which is weird ^ 2
- There’s still a learning curve, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’ll be looking at this youtube series to learn more: Spacemacs ABC - YouTube
I’ll also try out org-mode soon at some point (I tried it once and Spc-tabed a while and couldn’t figure out for the life of me how anything worked