Spacemacs

Name: Spacemacs
Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.

Free • Open Source
Text Editor
Code Editor

Mac
Windows
Linux

★

Avg rating of 4 (2)| 2 comments

What is Spacemacs?

Spacemacs is an beautiful Emacs distribution designed for both GNU Emacs icon GNU Emacs and Vim icon Vim users.

Features

Access documentation in Emacs with SPC h SPC.
Beautiful, distraction free UI and its functional mode-line.
All key bindings are accessible by pressing the space bar or alt-m.
Commands have mnemonic prefixes like SPC b for all the buffer commands or SPC p for the project commands.
Discover hundreds of ready-to-use packages nicely organised in configuration layers following a set of conventions.

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Official Links

Spacemacs Screenshots

Suggest and vote on features

Spacemacs Features

Spacemacs information

Developed bySylvain Benner
LicensingOpen Source (GPL-3.0) and Free product.
RatingAverage rating of 4
Alternatives37 alternatives listed

Supported Languages

English

GitHub repository

22,884 Stars
4,942 Forks
392 Open Issues
Updated

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Our users have written 2 comments and reviews about Spacemacs, and it has gotten 26 likes

Spacemacs was added to AlternativeTo by Ugotsta on and this page was last updated .

Comments and Reviews Post a comment/review

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Lunatica

★

Top positive comment• ago

The most full-featured and innovative Emacs distribution.

Spacemacs abstracts related Emacs packages/configurations through its set of layers (and there's a lot of layers, a lot). Example: you want to write Java code, then you just add "Java" to your ".spacemacs", restart Emacs, and you're mostly done (I say mostly because sometimes you'd want specific stuff like LSP and you'd need to set one or two variables and/or install the respective package for your distribution, although Spacemacs also offer the option to install it for you). If you want something that isn't already provided by the existing layers, you can 1. easily install specific Emacs packages and tweak them to your liking; or 2. create your own layer.

It offers Evil-mode integration (you don't need to use it though).
It has great documentation (both Spacemacs in general and for every layer), which you can read either on their very good website or inside Emacs/Spacemacs.
Its leader key ("space" on Evil mode, and "M-m" on Emacs mode) and mnemonics are so well thought that's no surprise it has inspired a lot other projects like Doom Emacs, Spacevim, Space VS Code, and so on.
It has this "transient state" for some specific modes which is another level of mode/keybinding abstraction, which is great.
Project management through its "layouts" (and then "workspaces" IIRC) is very good.
There are so many great things about Spacemacs it's hard to list them.

But it has it cons too:

Performance is not great, mainly and obviously when you add too much layers and customize it too much.
May crash/freeze a lot.
Development currently is in a state of Anarchy, as its main maintainer and creator just stopped maintaining it. Development still very active though on the "develop" branch by users and people who have admin permissions to that branch.
Community is not so supportive when you have specific issues that may not be related to Spacemacs but Emacs in general.
When you have issues it may not be an easy of a task to debug because Spacemacs abstraction is relatively complex.

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DanielNicolai

★

Top positive comment• ago

Combines the best of emacs and vim

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Said about Spacemacs as an alternative

inventor500

It is by far more extendable than Visual Studio Code, and combines the best of EMACS and VIM. The only downside is that it loads only a little faster than VS Code, instead of much faster like EMACS.

Positive comment• ago

• as an alternative to

Visual Studio Code

Lists containing Spacemacs

Linux Apps for Writers • Lunatica • Recently Discovered • Linux setup

Recent user activities on Spacemacs

Ugotsta added Spacemacs as alternative(s) to Zed editor
ago
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namdx1987 liked Spacemacs
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GuilleW added Spacemacs as alternative(s) to Pulsar Editor
ago