I just dove in about six months ago, and now I feel v productive in Spacemacs. The Spacemacs ABC videos are helpful.

Three of Spacemac's four pillars (mnemonic, discoverable, consistent) make it relatively easy to get the hang of. My early usage looked something like:

- Think of task I want to accomplish that probably has key binding

- Begin typing SPC - <continue drilling down through menus that look promising>

- If that doesn't work, type SPC-: and begin typing what I think the command might be called

- If that doesn't work, search web for "Spacemacs key binding <thing I want to do>"

- If that doesn't work, find/read relevant Spacemacs layer documentation

- If that doesn't work, ask in the Spacemacs gitter channel

- Memorize key binding

Once I learned a binding I found it easy to remember due to the mnemonicness:

open this file in Github? SPC-g-h-o of course (g (git) - h (..hub) - (open))

view most recent search buffer? SPC-s-l (s (search) - l (last search buffer))

maximize this window's buffer? SPC-w-m, etc

I have dabbled in spacemacs a tiny bit and I have been using vim for years. Basically I think there are two ways to learn spacemacs.

Method 1

1. Become proficient in vim

2. Become proficient in emacs

3. Learn spacemacs keyboard shortcuts

Method 2

1. Become proficient in emacs

2. Become proficient in vim

3. Learn spacemacs keyboard shortcuts

I'm a vim user, but I know almost nothing about emacs, so I am having a tough time adopting spacemacs. The basic editing features are a flawless reproduction of vim, but when I do `set textwidth=99` it doesn't work. Then I end up googling how to do this in spacemacs which is apparently `spc : set-fill-column <enter> 99`. This is just one example, but there are many others if you try to do anything different from the spacemacs defaults.

The documentation is very good. I recommend downloading and installing it and just playing around. Just press the spacebar and you'll see an organized, easily discoverable command interface pop up. Magit is very straightforward if you know how to use the git commandline. Type SPC g s (SPC git status) to open the magit on the current file, then ? to view the available commands. Although org-mode is a massive beast, it can still be productive to simply start by learning small parts and increase the set of features you use over time.

The whole thing should be fun, not just laborious.

http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/doc/QUICK_START.html

Besides the great documentation, watching "Spacemacs ABC" helped a lot: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrJ2YN5y27KLhd3yNs2dR...