Try Spacemacs.

If you only take one thing away from this post, that’s it. No matter whether you are Emacs, Vim, or you hate these old fashioned editors with terrible defaults, you must try Spacemacs.

Spacemacs is a curated initialisation directory for Emacs. Get Emacs at least version 24.4, and then get Spacemacs. Back up your ~/.emacs.d directory if you have one, and rename the Spacemacs directory to ~/.emacs.d . Open Emacs and follow the prompts. Choose between Emacs and Vim bindings when it asks you and Spacemacs will bootstrap itself and download the packages necessary to complete the installation. You can always change back to regular Emacs by swapping Spacemacs ~/.emacs.d with the one you backed up.

Why am I so excited about Spacemacs?

In short, Spacemacs is Emacs with not only a good set of default packages and key bindings, including Vim-like modal editing, its integrated “command centre” (my own term) continuously shows you the key bindings you need to see. When I press the space bar, a dialog instantly appears below and offers some command categories, like windows, files, or buffers. If I press “b” for buffers, the choices are narrowed to that category, as in the picture below.

In just a few days of using Spacemacs I feel like I have benefited from intensive Spacemacs training, without even the pain of doing a tutorial (granted, I have a working knowledge of Emacs and Vim). Each time I open the Command Centre I feel like I discover little gems. It has improved my work-flow so much that I have time to write this blog post!

Instead of spending hours sifting through GitHub pages and Elpa packages, trying to discern whether I’m (a) looking at the best Emacs package for the job, (b) whether the package is actively maintained, (c) whether or not I’m building my customisations around a package that will die soon; and, (d) how to set good defaults for the package, the Spacemacs expert hive-mind has done all that for the vast majority of packages that I use.

Veteran Emacsers and Vimmers alike are all but tossing years worth of customisations in favour of Spacemacs’ defaults, plus you can still integrate them in a “layer”.

The success of Spacemacs is founded upon three packages: Evil-mode, Helm, and Company. For the uninitiated, that’s Vim emulation, fuzzy searching, and an auto-completion engine. These are the modes that begin to turn a basic text editor into a modern and powerful programmer’s light-sabre.

Seriously go try Spacemacs.

My journey to Spacemacs

My degrees are in Computer Science and Mathematics, for which I wrote theses in LaTeX, and as a postdoc at Durham University I do a lot of programming in C and Python as well. I started with Emacs and AUCTeX about 5 years ago, slowly building up my configuration file and environment for LaTeX, Maple, PHP, Sage, Python, C, and so on, a few lines at a time.

With all the programming I have been doing I got Emacs pinky; an RSI caused by the awkward reaching my fingers did to hit Emacs’ famously complex key commands. I solved this problem in April 2016 by installing Evil-mode, which simulates Vim modal-editing (i.e., a mode for commands, a mode for movements, a mode for inserting text, etc., which minimises hand-contortions and finger-stretching) and I bought a TypeMatrix Keyboard and a trackball mouse. Truly life-changing kit, all of this.

But with all the packages I had installed, Emacs eventually became unuseably laggy. I had just filled my init file with every package I fancied, like a noob, and Emacs was stuck rendering whole pages just to display line numbers, and parsing entire C-projects just to provide auto-completion. Being near a deadline I temporarily jumped ship to Atom (a good backup plan) but soon I found the time to eliminate the packages that were slowing Emacs down.

As I sifted around for the latest and best packages, plus a way of bootstrapping my Emacs installation in order to port it to my other computers and have it download packages automatically, I decided to try Spacemacs. Not only was I astounded to find Spacemacs does exactly this, I realised I was just doing an amateur job putting together many of the same packages that Spacemacs assembles perfectly!

And so, here I am, very happy with Spacemacs