spacemacs/README.md


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Introduction

Spacemacs is a user-friendly and well-documented Emacs Advanced kit.

Advanced means here that it heavily and happily performs non-trivial tweaks and customization in order to make itself easy to use and unique.

Advanced does not mean that you have to be an advanced Emacs user, beginners are welcome and encouraged to use Spacemacs since it provides a simple architecture to contribute changes and hack others contributions.

Its status is beta for now, essentially because of the configuration system that is not yet finished but already usable.

And now, to use a well known catch line from Emacs Live:

M-x start-spacing !

Features

Convenient and Mnemonic Key Bindings

Spacemacs organizes key bindings by mnemonic namespaces. If you are looking for commands to operate on your buffer, they are right under <SPC> b, if you want to operate on your project, then it is <SPC> p, etc...

There is no need to learn convoluted Emacs chords, everything you need is under bindings that are easy to type and easy to remember.

Excellent Evil Support

Spacemacs comes with Vim modal editing through Evil Mode. Everything is designed with it in mind from the key bindings to the user interface. This includes fancy goodies like a micro-state for editing all occurences of a symbol and extra packages like ace-jump,evil-lisp-state and evil-nerd-commenter.

Batteries Included

Comes with configuration for hundreds of packages that make it fantastic out of the box. Many languages like Python, Ruby, Scala, R, SCSS, Elixir and Javascript come with modes, configuration and convenient key bindings. It also comes with Git support, project management and auto-completion. And all of this is optimized and lazy-loaded so you still get fast boot times!

And if that isn't enough you can use community contributed configuration layers for nice configurations of packages that aren't in the default distribution.

Great Documentation

Most Spacemacs features come with extensive documentation including key bindings, configuration options and explanations for beginners. And if you can't find the answers you need, ask your question in the Gitter Chat and a member of the community will help you out.

Visit the Documentation

Nice UI

Spacemacs is designed to look nice in a minimal and functional way. It comes with good theme support and a highly customized Powerline. The Powerline includes features like quick window switching numbers, Evil mode colors, and nice mode icons.

Prerequisites

Spacemacs is tested with Emacs 24.3 and 24.4. It should boot on all the major OSes where these versions can be installed.

Install

1. Backup your current ~/.emacs.d and clone the repo with the submodules:

   cd ~ mv .emacs.d .emacs.bak git clone --recursive http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ~/.emacs.d

master is a stable branch, if you want the "bleeding edge" checkout the develop branch.

2. Launch Emacs, the first time a bunch of packages will be downloaded and installed. When the package installation is complete restart Emacs and Spacemacs should be ready to use.

In case of failure see troubleshoot section in documentation.

Configuration

Configuration layers

Spacemacs is based on configuration layers. To create your own configuration layer:

<SPC> : config-system/create-layer RET

After entering a name, a layer skeleton will be created in the private directory. The private directory is ignored by Git.

To use your newly created configuration layer, add it to your ~/.spacemacs file (see next section).

Dotfile ~/.spacemacs

Spacemacs has a convenient dotfile. You have to install it by invoking the following command inside Emacs:

<SPC> : dotspacemacs/install RET

Refers directly to the file ~/.spacemacs to get documentation or navigate to the dotfile configuration section of DOCUMENTATION.md.

Contributions

To consult the contribution guidelines go to CONTRIBUTE.md.

Help commands

Key bindings

1. By default, guide-key and guide-key-tip are enabled.

Whenever you press a prefix command (like <SPC>) and wait for one second, a buffer appear listing the possible keys following this prefix.

2. You can also easily get a full list of all the key bindings by pressing:

   ?

To narrow the list to Spacemacs specific key bindings set the pattern to something like the regular expression:

`^SPC\ b`

The example above will list all the buffer related bindings.

Other describe functions

Emacs describe-xxx function are accessible with the following bindings:

Key Binding	Description
<SPC> h d f	describe-function
<SPC> h d k	describe-key
<SPC> h d m	describe-mode
<SPC> h d v	describe-variable