How to learn Spacemacs as a vim/emacs newbie?

I have used Sublime Text for a long time now. (Before that, I used Notepad++ for an equally long time. When I was still using Windows.)

However, I have seen many people on this forum talk very enthusiastically about Spacemacs, and I really like the idea of being able to control all of my computer without touching my mouse. I love the idea of key bindings. These last three years, I have been depending on the terminal for more and more of my daily tasks.

Therefore, I decided that I wanted to learn how to use Spacemacs.
So, I installed it and tried to learn it. However:

The emacs starting tutorial is hard to follow, as spacemacs has rebound nearly all of even the most basic commands.
The evil-mode starting tutorial presumes that you have a background in vim, emacs or both.
When I try to perform some emacs command, it turns out I am actually in some weird vim-mode and the keypresses do not do what I think they should be doing.
None of my prior knowledge of keybindings (Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+X to cut, Ctrl+V to paste, Ctrl+Z to undo, Ctrl+Y to redo, Ctrl with arrow keys to move between words, Shift with arrow keys to select larger portions of text, etc) applies here.

So, in summary: Help!

I feel like this is a very powerful tool, but I have absolutely no idea how to get started.
What would be a good way to learn Spacemacs, as someone who knows their way around the terminal and Sublime Text, but has no clue about both Vim and Emacs?

Thank you

~Wiebe-Marten/Qqwy

17 comments

#spacemacs #vim #code-editors

1 10510 17

2019-03-06 10:46:17 UTC

Most Liked

Oxyrus

If you want to use it in evil mode, there is a game to learn the key bindings http://vim-adventures.com

Practice, it’s super cool to use only your keyboard

Post #8

jbr95

Hi Qqwy! I’m in the same boat you were in when you posted in September 2016! I’m trying to decide how to get started with emacs/spacemacs, coming from Notepad++ and Sublime Text. My main motivation is based on being excited by what I’ve read of org-mode… can’t wait to try it!

It looks like by October that you were happy with Spacemacs. I’m going to to this way, too.

My question is: upon first installation, you are asked whether to use full vim/evil mode (default) or the emacs/evil hybrid mode. Which did you use? What would you recommend, two and a half years later?

Post #10

NobbZ

If you have no background on vim, choose the emacs mode on first install, this way you have only to learn emacs bindings, and you can ignore all that edit/read-mode stuff, that in my opinion often confuses. As I do read your history in editors, you are used to type, not to mode-switching.

After you have choosen the emacs-flavored spacemacs, you can safely follow the emacs tutorials.

And you will get used to the context-switching between emacs and the outer world, when it comes to bindings. You will totally not realize the popping “save as…” window of your browser when you want to search something, you just hit cancel without even noticing. It will feel some day as if C-s ESC C-f is the native keybinding for searching on the current website

You will also get used to all the other key bindings and you will be able to switch back and forth depending on the active application.

Post #2

Last Post!

Qqwy

TypeCheck Core Team

I did the included Vim-tutorial to get up to speed with the basics. Besides this, I looked up some common keybindings for the mayor modes (= the integrations for programming languages) I was using. Using SPC SPC gives you a list of all commands that you can search/filter through, with for each command listing the shortcut as well. That is how I learned the rest.

Post #18