While Spacemacs is a good project I personally prefer my own configuration.
I prefer to call Emacs «Emacs» (sometimes I even call it by its full name: Gnu/Emacs, as the elders taught me). Spacemacs is to my best knowledge some alterations to keybindings and a collection of elisp packages, put together and configured to work really nicely for many people. While I am interested in how the Spacemacs configs can improve my Emacs, it is not really “idiomatic” Emacs, and I would probably end up very confused if I tried Spacemacs; but I could see something and go «that is pretty neat, we could do that in Alchemist!»—some of the features that has been added to alchemist over the times has come from other Elixir modes and integrations: one example is the integration with the Hex package manager where information (versions, author, etc) is fetched from hex.pm and displayed in a buffer. That idea was blatantly stolen from a Vim-plugin.
We do nothing to elixir-mode and alchemist that target Spacemacs or any other starter package—it is totally neutral and non-biased in that regard, and in some cases features (such as code folding) are not even considered to be implemented at all because other elisp packages handle that better than alchemist could do, or because some people might prefer an alternative auto complete engine, or something third—so I guess my rant would end with the wish for a vanilla Emacs/Alchemist.el thread; and I’ll pop my head into the Spacemacs thread once in a while to see what’s brewing!
I don’t intent this message to be condescending. It is my hope that it is informative
It’s very informative, thanks. Tbh, I have actually wondered whether I should skip learning Spacemacs and just try Emacs and Alchemist instead. I’d be particularly interested in hearing what the differences are, and which people prefer (and why).
So yeah, go ahead and start an Emacs & Alchemist thread - we can make it a wiki like the Spacemacs one if you like?
That would be awesome From time to time a blog post is written about Emacs+Elixir and it would be neat to collect them somewhere.
When I came back to Emacs after a couple of years with TextMate, I started out with a starter package—I can’t remember what it was called, but it worked pretty nicely for me for a while. One day I decided to get rid of some of the stuff I didn’t like about the starter package and roll my own config.
I imagine that, if you go the vanilla route, you should look into Evil-mode. It is a port of Vim in Emacs. You have the keybindings of Vim with the runtime of Emacs. It is one of the more popular Emacs modes out there.
But I suggest that you just enjoy Emacs however you like, and start tinkering when you feel something is off or could be better
Yeah, I’ve set-up Spacemacs with evil mode but I was wondering whether Emacs (native) might be better than Vim, hence contemplating checking it out
You mentioning TextMate just reminded me, I am working on an Elixir theme, that will hopefully work on all editors. I might put it up in beta for TextMate (and Sublime and Atom - as they are easy enough to convert the theme to) and if there are no stoppers I can start work on the Vim and Emacs versions.
Re the Wiki, go ahead and start it as a normal thread and then me or one of the mods can make it a wiki for you - thank for doing this
It is free and open source software, so the only thing you can lose is a bit of time, and everything you can gain is the editor of a lifetime.
Notice that Emacs and Spacemacs might be two different from what you are used to, and the usage philosophies are slightly different from most other editors—this means that there might be a learning curve, but don’t let that discourage you. I suggest that people who wanna try either Emacs or Spacemacs spend more than an hour with each (perhaps even a week), and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
I use Sublime Text on Linux Mint and Windows for gaming When I want to check something also on Windows, I have Atom, which is really awesome. Elixir is one of the languages I have on both platforms, for me it meant a lot.
but I was wondering whether Emacs (native) might be better than Vim, hence contemplating checking it out 
