From init.el to .spacemacs

12 Jan 2016 | Tags: Emacs, Spacemacs, Editor

I was a Vim user for two days before converting to Emacs. (No troll intended; I have nothing against Vim; it’s just I couldn’t get GDB to work in Vim after spending two unproductive days.)

Like many Emacs users, my init.el is highly customized: at first it was just a collection of snippets from the internet. Later it grew so large that I decided to use org-babel to organize my settings.

I was quite happy with my init.org: thanks to org-mode, my elips snippets are structured nicely with well-formatted documentation. However, it would take a minute to start Emacs with my configuration. This is annoying. So I took redguardtoo’s advice and forked purcell’s configuration as my base configuration.

purcell’s configuration is loaded with lots of high quality configurations. Not only that, he constantly updates and maintains his settings so I don’t have to. It’s great to have a very knowledgeable expert optimizing my configuration. I can also add customization by putting my stuffs in init-local.el and init-preload-local.el.

Although I am pretty satisfied with purcell’s settings, I am still actively seeking good configurations. Then I met Spacemacs. It’s a crowd-configured Emacs configuration with insanely good settings that you can be productive from day one. If you already know either Emacs or Vim, you can pick up Spacemacs quite easily.

Spacemacs is actively developed by hundreds of users around the world. Thanks to Sylvain Benner, who made this possible by creating a consistent and well-designed framework so that Spacemacs can grow organically in the community.

If you are not convinced yet, have a look at John Stevenson’s nicely written blog post about Spacemacs. I’ll see you on the ship of Spacemacs!