Started using Spacemacs

For a long time I'd been using Sublime Text as my primary code/text editor, and I loved it very much. A few months ago, though, I decided it was time for a change. Connecting to an nrepl via Sublime wasn't supported, I had some concerns about the long-term support of a closed-source editor, and I started hearing about an editor called Spacemacs.

As someone who doesn't find the endless text editor war particularly interesting, and who just wanted a modern, powerful all-purpose editor, Spacemacs appealed to me. Longtime users of either Vim or Emacs will likely scoff at Spacemacs' unholy marriage of the two. Spacemacs is essentially a bunch of configuration on top of Emacs with Vim keybindings as the default ("The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim!"). Whenever I tried to pick up Emacs in the past, I found the keybindings unintuitive. I liked Vim keybindings more (and had been using ST's Vintage Mode to approximate that), but both Emacs and Vim lacked for me the seamlessness of ST's Package Control and its aesthetic.

Spacemacs seems to be the sweet spot for now. Its "layers" system is almost as simple as ST's package manager and the keybindings are logical and consistent across modes. And it looks good with very little customization.

It's not without warts--some mode buffers don't support evil keybindings and will fall back to Emacs bindings. The community-configuration is a double-edged sword: you get a lot of nice stuff out of the box, but when something goes wrong it can be hard to know how to fix it, although the community I've found to be helpful.

Some of my coworkers seem to have expressed worry that I'm investing time into what they see as a dead-end editor--that ten years from now I'll have accumulated a bunch of useless muscle memory. I'm not too concerned.