Spacemacs the beautiful emacs

With the recent adoption of Elixir it has been apparent that it is just to new of a language to have IDEs, to new to have good plugins for visual studio code and atom. The sublime text plugin does a decent job but not like I’m used too. In comes emacs, now I know this causes a divide between vim and emacs. But I have picked emacs for its ability to be everything, to open it up and never leave it. Vim however is on almost every Unix based system by default, so when it comes time to do any work on a system I can always resort to vim to get stuff done. What about the key bindings? This was my main concern with going with vim over emacs, I wanted the ability to migrate to any system and be able to get something done. In comes spacemacs, it’s a plug-in for emacs that adds a whole bunch of things and gives you the option to use either vim or emacs key bindings. This was a game changer, it made me switch to emacs. I'm fascinated by the people who can have a computer without a mouse, being able to do anything and everything with a keyboard, fast efficient and effective. I took the plunge and have started various tutorials, the obvious one being evil the emacs tutorial with vim bindings. This is a fantastic way to learn the insane amount of key configurations and the power of emacs. However, it wasn’t long before I became bored and figured I may as well just get into some real coding. The boss and I both picked it up at the same time, so we decided may as well integrate it with our current workflow, at first it was extremely slow, everything took ages, I constantly had to look everything up. After a few days of this I started to get the basics down and for the most part it’s faster than using vs code but I haven’t figured out even 1% of the key bindings so I know it will only get better. I have struggled with the plugin projectile, it’s supposed to make working with projects easier but I don’t quite get how it works. One quick thing that I would like to mention about spacemacs is that it doesn’t follow the traditional way of package installation that the base emacs uses. I ran into a really annoying situation each time I used emacs, I would install some package through package-install then on reboot it would disappear. I couldn’t find any mention of this on the web and even asked a question on stackoverflow. It turns out because spacemacs uses a different config file to the emacs.d default it sees the installed packages as orphans and just deletes them. You actually have to install them directly by editing the dotspacesmacs file, adding in all the packages you want, then on reboot they will be installed like you would think package-install would. I would recommend trying emacs, it’s not for everyone and it can be really daunting but it does speed up development when you know how to use it effectively.