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Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

I started using Spacemacs recently for its out-of-the-box IDE-like features but the layers' functionality seems to be fairly hit-or-miss and overall the impression is one of a bug-infested nightmare. Every time I try to set up my environment on a new machine, I get some new set of problems that I have no idea how to solve (disappearing powerline, broken neotree, weird projectile caching behavior totally breaking my workflow, busted syntax checking, and more). I don't blame the Spacemacs folks for this; I actually think what they've done is really cool. Emacs simply is what it is, I think. I don't have time nor inclination to learn elisp and build/fix my own environment.

When it does work, it's great. But the inconsistency is probably going to drive me away, back to Vim. I think that if anyone can build a similar thing for Vim that actually works, I'll use it in a heartbeat.

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I have the exact opposite experience with vanilla Emacs. It works consistently without issue.

Regarding plugins you can use melpa and track the latest release of everything at all times.

You can use melpa and update most stuff infrequently save for the ones that are most important to you.

You can use melpa stable and run only stable versions of everything.

You can use melpa stable and run newer versions of a minority of plugins that are important to you.

What plugins you choose to use and and whether you choose stable or unstable could very well lead to vastly different experiences.

The best strategy is to carefully select plugins which are useful to you and high quality, and run the stable versions of most things updating your tools infrequently when a new major release adds something that looks useful to you.

There's a lot of factors here; were you on dev or master? What I suggest doing is using dev, but pinning yourself to a particular commit. Once you see that things are working, using that commit across all your machines. You can have a fork that you never push to, except to fast forward when you feel like upgrading. Just pull from that fork on new machines instead of from the main repo.

The only other thing that can break you other than updating spacemacs is updating packages, but that's a factor with vanilla emacs and with vim. This happens occasionally but not too often.

Also keep in mind: spacemacs is not all or nothing. There are many, many layers that are higher in the dependency tree, that both get less attention and are easier to swap. For instance, even though I mostly develop in C++, I don't use the C/C++ layer from spacemacs. There were things I wanted that were missing (like rtags), and things that I didn't want that were there (like older tags solutions).

I started out by just configuring rtags inside a single simple file, the same way a vanilla emacs user would, and I dropped the C++ layer. I eventually added more stuff and wrote my own C++ layer. I'm quite happy with the result. I still got a ton of useful layers/packages from spacemacs that were easily setup and configured, like evil, magit, helm, company, flycheck, etc. And the whole layer system itself made even the parts that I customized myself more modular.

That's a general problem with many 'frameworks'. When something goes off the happy path, the abstraction is gone and the user is dealing with the underlying abstractions. Elisp for Spacemacs; JavaScript for the hotness of the month, and X11 for Ubuntu.

I don't think it's really possible to build something like Spacemacs for Vim because of the different underlying architectural decisions. Vim is a one-thing-only-and-do-it-well tool. Emacs is 'an operating system missing a decent text edtior'.

I had the same experience with spacemacs, but it made me realize what I was missing with vim. Currently trying to build up an emacs/evil config from scratch.

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