From Kakoune back to (Spac)Emacs

I was mostly a happy kakoune user while working with it on commercial Ruby on Rails projects. The only thing that bothered me was that autoformatting using RuboCop sometimes left an additional line containing end at the end of a buffer, thus leading to a syntax error.

Over time I decided to give a few programming language that I check out periodically a try and quickl ran into issues: F# looks like a great language, but getting a language server running without using VSCode was impossible, even after tinkering with it for several hours. Similar problems occurred when wanting to try out Haskell.

Since I'll be starting a new project in the coming days, I decided to use this as an opportunity to revisit my tools.

So far I've spent 1 hour getting familiar with Spacemacs and have to say it's great! So many things work out of the box and there is a good story for adding your own configuration settings. Even though it doesn't look like there is much to configure.

The discoverability of the keybindings in the UI is the best I've seen so far. And true to the Emacs ethos, every action that can be performed in the editor is bindable to a key sequence. Spacemacs stays true to this philosophy and makes the tree of keybindings visible and easily accessible.

Pervasive use of helm for handling "the user needs to choose an action here" further helps with discoverability of options.

So far the documentation of Spacemacs has been able to answer all my questions. I'll stick to Spacemacs at least for the next 4 weeks, keeping an eye on any challenges that cannot be resolved.

Since Spacemacs comes with so many graphical goodies, I've decided to deviate from my normal workflow and run a graphical version of Emacs. Dividing my attention between the browser, emacs, and tmux is going to be another challenge to my muscle memory.