Spacemacs

Definitely Spacemacs.

I’ve been using Atom with one of the Elixir plugins (is there more than one?) for a couple of days but missed shell and REPL smooth integration, so I let it go.
I respect the plugin’s developer(s) enormously, just didn’t hit it off right.

Then it was IntelliJ IDEA with KronicDeth’s (hope I get the username correct) plugin.
I have mad props for anyone who is able to code in Java a plugin for IntelliJ, a super sophisticated IDE, to support Elixir, but the configuration on that… I know my way around IntelliJ and even I was overwhelmed.

Then I tried Spacemacs.
Ooooh boy.

Helm to find any functionality I need in a fuzzy-search; Projectile to manage everything about your project; NeoTree/Dired to manage you file system from within Emacs; Avy to snap to any line in the buffer (or even specific character); Vim keybinding honed over 30 years to make you never have to take your hands off the keyboard; Vim’s functionality composition (talking about FP, 30 years ago, FTW) which means, for example, if you know how to delete a single line (d-d) and you know how to reach the end of the buffer (Shift-g) you now know how do delete to the end of the buffer (d-shift-g); Emac’s extendibility which means you have tons of community-developed “layers”, as they’re referred to on Spacemac’s community, to extend your usage (or just roll your own, using e-Lisp, a dialect of Scheme-Lisp… the holy-grail of FP languages)…

And of course, best for last: Alchemist layer allowing seamless integration of Elixir support in Emacs which means, among other: Projectile supports Elixir projects and recognizes them as such; elixir, iex and mix are supported out-of-the-box and better yet, its a three-button sequence to not only launch the correct app, but with flags (e.g. iex -S mix? SPC-m-s-i; mix test? SPC-m-t-a).

Oh, and did I mention I got all this functionality down in about a week of part-time-coding? Imagine what you can learn to do after a month of full-time “coding-is-my-day-job”. A year…

Sure, Emacs’s 30+ years of age show… no fancy, eye-candy GUI.
Just a fast-loading, super productive, robust as hell with very few bugs, “A superb operating system only lacking a decent text editor” (as the known adage goes) piece of software.

Why was I so scared for so long to take this leap of faith?
Not going back to anything else, that’s for sure.

Spacemacs

What I can recommend for now everything based on alchemist-server:

• Atom + GitHub - msaraiva/atom-elixir: An Atom package for Elixir · GitHub
• Spacemacs + Alchemist plugin → you can check forum Spacemacs - General Discussion, Blog Posts, Wiki - #36 by flou
• vim + GitHub - slashmili/alchemist.vim: Elixir Integration Into Vim · GitHub
• sublime https://github.com/smashedtoatoms/sublime-elixir-alchemist

Mayebe in future Intelij + elixir plugin GitHub - KronicDeth/intellij-elixir: Elixir plugin for JetBrain's IntelliJ Platform (including Rubymine) · GitHub