I would say, for most “regular users” (meaning someone who’s comfortable but not the tpope of emacs), you’ll be fine with most layers. Layers being the set of packages and settings for those packages that make up what you add to your config file.
As an example, if I want to edit ex-files I’ll add elixir to my layers and restart, which will install a pre-configured set of packages and customizations for those packages, these being aimed at Elixir editing and tooling. This is the abstraction you’d create when you were setting something up for yourself and it’s not a completely horrible experience, even in the cases where spacemacs is missing something. Before you get to that point, most layers will already be set up reasonably for you.
The anectode you wrote would be pretty much the same for spacemacs in that you’d be able to add any additional customization that pertains to your user-config in your config file as it is has both dotspacemacs/init (executed before loading of packages) and dotspacemacs/user-config (executed after loading of packages).
I’ve tried all four customizations, still nowhere near acceptable for me, sadly…
I have long succumbed to the assumption that most programmers just don’t prioritize UI and syntax coloring I’ve had enough of high contrast syntax themes with vivid colors, but the low contrast ones such as Solarized and Zenburn are too… weird?
Lately I’ve been using Nord theme, which has a calm and cool atmosphere with it while having just enough contrast for highlighting, for almost everything (Vim, Atom, iTerm2, etc.) and I’m loving it. It’s just so beautiful. Sadly there’s still no Emacs/Spacemacs port for it.
Good point, but I use treeview on Atom for 1) creating new files or folders, 2) moving files around, 3) get a glimpse of the current state of working dir in git (Atom’s git integration is awesome). I think I’m not good enough at doing these things on either Vim or Emacs I’m currently trying not to depend on treeviews that much and instead embrace the power of ctrlp.
It’s both Cmd+T and Cmd+P here on OSX, I suppose it’s the same too on Windows and LInux.
Well, When I do write CTRL-P I do mean to press “CTRL” and “P”, when I write CTRL-SHIFT-P, I mean to press that three, so maybe thats where the confusion comes from
I use Emacs with Alchemist. Atom crashes too often while writing Elixir code, and my fingers could never quite memorize the VIM key mappings, especially when I walked away from coding for a while. Somehow the Emacs key mappings seem to “stick” for me, and Alchemist is an amazing plugin for having a single interface to a full featured development environment.
One plus for VS Code as editor but plugin for Elixir is also not so great. I don’t know if something can beat Alchemist. Maybe someone will write plugin for VS Code with Alchemist support
Correction
I see there is something related to Alchemist (Implemented autocomplete and goto-definition)
For those of you who have used Vim in the past but have’t given SpaceMacs a good go yet, I urge you to try it!
I’ve been setting it up myself these past few days and I think I am already in love I’ve also updated our wiki so that it’s an excellent starting point that will get you set-up in no time: Spacemacs - General Discussion, Blog Posts, Wiki
Make sure you use the Elixify theme as well - it makes a difference, even if I do say so myself
If you want a taste of why you might want to use it, check out this video that @mkunikow posted on the forum earlier today:
I’m a plain old Emacs user and never latched onto Vim, but this video convinced me to give it a try.
Apparently the Meta commands still work (see when he opens eshell). Learning the Vim-inspired commands and configured commands for integrating with Emacs tools will be easier due to the suggestion buffer that pops up after pressing the leader key.
It may take a while to get used to reaching all the way up to the ESC key all the time, but I bet that can be reconfigured easily.
Does Spacemacs play well in both the terminal and GUI?
Is there any benefit in using eshell? Unfortunately it does not honour my .bash_profile (the ‘normal’ shell does now that I created a .bashrc file though).
When I launch from terminal with emacs I get the same thing as opening from my dock - which is different to Vim which actually opens inside the terminal window. Ok just looked, and you can open it inside terminal with emacs --no-window-system - when I do that it ignores my theme but seems ok otherwise.
It’s a mixed bag. In practice I often use it for brief ad-hoc tasks and a “real” terminal emulator for longer running tasks like a Phoenix server or tasks that don’t involve Emacs. It’s great if I need to quickly poke around directory trees, cat files, delete files, etc. Dired can do some of that too, but it tends to create a lot of buffers and I’m already comfortable with the shell.
My default shell in Ubuntu is currently zsh, and elisp respects that. It even loaded the environment variables configured in my ~/.zshrc. I’m not sure whether it’s inferior to an external terminal in any way other than being slower. Emacs isn’t very good with concurrent tasks, unfortunately.
Other benefits off the top of my head include elisp evaluation and a full-blown Emacs editing experience. In a vanilla terminal if I want to search the stdout of some command, for instance, I often end up running it again with a pipe into less so I can use the ‘/’ search command. In eshell I can use all the standard Emacs features by default. Readline support in terminals goes a long way, but it’s not quite the same as having an Emacs buffer.
Excellent. I tend to use emacs -nw when I want a terminal session; otherwise, it defaults to GUI like you said.
I’ve had enough of high contrast syntax themes with vivid colors, but the low contrast ones such as Solarized and Zenburn are too… weird?
I’ve also updated our wiki so that it’s an excellent starting point that will get you set-up in no time: 
