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 contribution 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 !

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

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.

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

Then choose a name and 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

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.

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

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