Disclaimer: I hope this post does not offend anyone. I do mention both vim and emacs, so reader disgression is advised.

When I first started programming, my teacher forced us to write our code in Windows notepad. Not even notepad++. Notepad.

Looking back, I suppose I understand his rationale; if we learned to write code with all of the assistance that an IDE provides, we wouldn’t understand what is actually going on. (Clicking “Run” is very different from typing javac at the command line, and I’m glad that I started off with that deeper understanding.) By the time that I was headed to college, I understood that I could write code even without the bells and whistles of IDEs and code editors.

But that didn’t mean I could write good code.

Since those days, I have learned to rely on and appreciate the tools that are available to help me do my work. Writing code is constant multitasking: a programmer is simultaneously solving high level problems and dealing with the nuance of implementing the solutions. Any experienced programmer will tell you that it takes a lot of focus to write good code, so I am glad that there is such a rich ecosystem of tools to make the process easier. I have used a number of code editors and IDEs, from Eclipse to Sublime Text to, most recently, Vim. For the last year or so, I learned to love Vim and it’s amazingly efficient editing style. It’s how I write most of my code, as well as most things that aren’t code. It’s completely changed the way that I think about programming.

Lately, though, I have gotten a little bit frustrated with Vim. While I appreciate its philosophy of configurability, it has become increasingly frustrating to actually configure all of the behaviors that I want. I’ve also had more and more need for advanced code editing features like debugging and linting, which are difficult or impossible to actually get set up in Vim.

Enter Emacs.

A few weeks ago, some lucky YouTube video recommendations led me to watch a few talks on Emacs. From what I could see, it had all of the powerful features that I was looking for, along with the same level of “hackability” that I had gotten used to in Vim. Even more importantly, Emacs has evil-mode. Evil stands for Extensible vi Layer, and is basically a full implementation of Vim in Emacs Lisp. (((Emacs uses a dialect of lisp to configure behavior instead of a custom language like vimscript.))) That meant that I could have my cake and eat it too; the editing style of Vim with the power of Emacs.

There was just one problem left to tackle: Emacs pinky. I’ll be honest, I don’t have the largest hands in the world, and the thought of reaching for control or alt any time I wanted to do something was not particularly appealing.

Enter spacemacs.

Spacemacs is a custom Emacs distribution that is built on evil-mode and configured with Vim users in mind. Basically, Spacemacs changes almost all of the Emacs key-bindings to the spacebar (the “space”, in spacemacs) followed by a short string of characters. For example, SPC f s saves the current buffer, and SPC g s displays an interactive window with Git status information. In keeping with Vim’s philosophy, these bindings all all mnemonic; “f s” corresponds to “file, save”, “g s” for “git, status”, etc. It was shocking how quick it was to get used to, and before I knew it I had written a couple thousand lines of code (and this blog post) in spacemacs.

So, if you happen to be like me (comfortable with Vim, but looking for a more powerful code editor), give spacemacs a try. I can say for sure that it is the first editor in a while that I’ve felt actually has what I need.