[neutronicus]

If you think vi does basic text editing better, try Spacemacs! I switched over recently (the emacs pinky was real...) and I've really gotten to like the vim-y experience (although now I get really frustrated when I vim on a server and the search doesn't work like Spacemacs search).

[microtonal]

I used Spacemacs for a while, but switched to a custom configuration with evil, general.el, and which-key. Spacemacs was excessively slow and I also often ran into strange bugs.

[jeremiep]

I did the exact opposite, I got tired of vanilla Emacs and managing my custom configuration. Then I found about Spacemacs and never looked back.

I didn't get any strange bugs or slowdowns, but then I am using the `develop` branch which is going to be the upcoming .3 release. I also have a few dozen layers installed.

I would miss Spacemacs' layers way too much if I reverted to vanilla. Its integration of evil-mode is also fantastic, something I don't want or need to recreate.

[pzone]

The upcoming .3 release will support a custom package archive. A lot of the bugginess in Spacemacs is caused by frequently pulling 100+ bleeding-edge MELPA packages.

[loevborg]

Any news when the new release will come out? I like to keep to master, but wouldn't mind an upgrade to a stable version soon.

[jeremiep]

I've already been using .3 for a while, just switch to the `develop` branch :)

[dongsheng]

same issue here, spacemacs is a very nice package but I just have no idea how to fix it when ran into bugs, I started to build my own .emacs.d since last month.

[jsilence]

The spacemacs community on gitter is a helpful crowd. Treating newbies with patience and encouraging asking questions.

[xenophonf]

If possible, swap Caps Lock with Left Control like it was on the old Sun and Apple keyboards. Having Control on the home row makes it much more comfortable typing common left-hand-only keyboard shortcuts like C-x, C-w, C-a, C-q, C-s, C-e, C-v, and C-z, as well as chords such as M-C-v, M-C-c, or M-C-d. On Windows you can edit the scan code map in the registry to swap the mappings, although this sometimes breaks laptop buttons that are implemented as USB HIDs (e.g., secure attention keys on tablets that work by sending the Control, Alt, and Del scan codes like a real keyboard would). On Macs I also swap Option and Command, since Option usually gets mapped to Left Alt in terminals and in Emacs.

On FreeBSD the syscons driver lets you edit the keyboard maps in a text file. I don't know how to do it in newcons. I forget how to do it in Linux. If all you care about is X, you can also use xmodmap (IIRC).

[jaequery]

in OSX, how did you swap opt and cmd? i went through hoops to do that and finally managed to do it without replacing opt/cmd os-wide using cmdkeyhappy.

[rthille]

Before OS-X would let you do that, I took my PowerBook's keyboard out, cut the trace and redrew the traces to connect the CapsLock key to the Control traces. :-)

Now it's done by simply going to System-Preferences=>Keyboard=>Modifier Keys

[cuddlybacon]

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys...