Spacemacs

Spacemacs is a popular configuration layer and distribution based on Emacs. It aims to provide an ergonomic and consistent experience by adopting vim-style key bindings and integrating extensions like auto-completion and syntax checking.

Development Text Editors

vim emacs spacemacs text-editor keyboard-shortcuts autocompletion syntax-highlighting

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Spacemacs: Ergonomic Configuration Layer & Distribution for Emacss

Spacemacs is a popular configuration layer and distribution based on Emacs, providing an ergonomic and consistent experience through vim-style key bindings and integrated extensions like auto-completion and syntax checking.

What is Spacemacs?

Spacemacs is a popular open source configuration layer and distribution for the Emacs text editor. It builds on top of Emacs by adding support for Vim key bindings through the Evil mode extension, as well providing a curated set of extensions and customizations aimed at improving the user experience.

The goal of Spacemacs is to provide an approachable, consistent editing experience with ergonomic key bindings, mnemonic shortcuts, and integrated support for features like auto-completion, syntax checking, and git integration. It comes preconfigured with layers that provide language-specific support for writing code, taking notes, chatting over IRC/Slack/Discord, and more.

By leveraging the flexibility and extensibility of Emacs, Spacemacs is able to offer users a highly customizable editing environment tailored specifically for their needs. It has over 400 built-in packages carefully curated to cover a wide range of use cases, from programming to writing prose. An active community also contributes new layers to further extend Spacemacs' capabilities.

With its focus on unifying the best parts of the Vim and Emacs worlds under one roof, Spacemacs has garnered a substantial following among developers, writers, students, and computing enthusiasts since its initial release in 2012. Its large collection of community-maintained configuration layers empowers both new and experienced Emacs users to be productive without having to deeply understand Emacs' internals.

Spacemacs Features

Features

Vim-style key bindings
Evil mode for Vim emulation
Support for many languages and frameworks
Preconfigured with many plugins
Easy customization and extension
Great documentation and community support

Pricing

Open Source

Pros

Very customizable and extensible

Combines the power of Emacs with Vim key bindings

Out of the box configuration for many use cases

Active community and ecosystem

Well documented

Cons

Steep learning curve for new users

Complex configuration system can be overwhelming initially

Performance not as fast as vanilla Emacs

Breaking changes between versions

Official Links

Official Website
https://spacemacs.org/

The Best Spacemacs Alternatives

Top Development and Text Editors and other similar apps like Spacemacs

Here are some alternatives to Spacemacs:

Visual Studio Code

Neovim

Sublime Text

VSCodium

GNU Emacs

Lapce

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Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft that includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. It's free, open-source, and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.As a lightweight but powerful code editor, VS Code gives developers a fast...

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Neovim

Neovim is a hyperextensible Vim-based text editor developed since 2014. It is a rewrite and refactoring of Vim to allow for greater plugin/extension development. Neovim offers the core functionality of Vim - the keybindings, editing modes, configuration options that users are familiar with - just with a more streamlined codebase...

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Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose. It has a clean, intuitive, and unobtrusive user interface with excellent performance. Sublime Text is highly customizable and extensible with Python plugins. Key features include:Fast, lightweight, and responsive user interfaceCross-platform availability for Linux, Windows, and macOSPowerful search and...

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VSCodium

VSCodium is an open source, community-driven alternative to Microsoft's popular Visual Studio Code editor. It is based on the same codebase as Visual Studio Code, but stripped of any Microsoft branding, telemetry or tracking. Just like VS Code, VSCodium is a free, cross-platform source code editor with support for debugging,...

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GNU Emacs

GNU Emacs is a powerful, customizable, open source text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This extensibility allows Emacs to provide far more than your average text editor.Beyond text editing, Emacs...

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Lapce

Lapce is an open-source, cross-platform raster graphics editor focused on photo editing and image manipulation. It is an alternative to Adobe Photoshop with similar features and capabilities.Lapce provides a complete suite of image editing and retouching tools for working with digital photographs. Key features include:Support for layers and masksAdjustment layers...

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Bluefish Editor

Bluefish Editor is a powerful, customizable, and lightweight text editor and web development environment for Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows platforms. First released in 1998, Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages including HTML, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, XML, CSS, and so on.Some key features of Bluefish Editor...

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CudaText

CudaText is a powerful, lightweight text editor for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Developed by Alexey Torgashin, it is written in Lazarus and designed to provide many useful features while keeping high performance and low memory usage.Some key features of CudaText include:Fast and lightweight - starts quickly and uses little RAMSupports...

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Pulsar Editor

Pulsar Editor is a free, open source, lightweight text and code editor available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Despite its simplicity, Pulsar packs robust features for programmers and writers alike.Syntax highlighting for over 20 programming and markup languages helps developers easily scan code. The minimal UI keeps the focus on...

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Helix

Helix is a distributed version control system that developers use to track changes to software development projects over time. Unlike centralized version control systems, Helix allows developers to work locally and offline and have full history and version tracking abilities without necessarily being connected to the central Helix repository.Key features...

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Spacevim

Spacevim is a distribution of the Vim text editor that has been preconfigured with many plugins and settings to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience. The goal of Spacevim is to build a lightweight and fast Vim configuration focused on ergonomics and customizability.Some of the key features that come bundled...

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SpaceNeovim

SpaceNeovim is a graphical user interface for the Neovim text editor built using Rust. Its goal is to provide a fast, customizable, and easy-to-use interface for Neovim.Some key features of SpaceNeovim include:Fuzzy finding - Quickly open files and jump between symbols in your projectsCode completion - Intelligent suggestions for variables,...

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Emacs Prelude

Emacs Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience. It provides sensible defaults, out-of-the-box experience, and bundles many useful Emacs packages.Key features of Emacs Prelude include:Enhanced UX - Provides an improved out-of-the-box experience by bundled many Emacs packages for a variety of use cases.Sensible defaults...

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Jove

Jove is an open-source web application designed for easily publishing rich interactive computational content online. It was created at Data Science Institute of University of Virginia for the data science community to disseminate knowledge. The Jove platform allows users to create tutorials and lessons that combine code, results, plots, figures,...

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