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by imdoor 1988 days ago
In Spacemacs i essentially have the sought after experience. It goes something like:

0. Know i will be working with C, expect that a C layer should exist

1. Open the docs for the C layer with SPC h l <search for C>,

2. In there, search how to set it up to use a lsp backend

3. add (c-c++ :variables c-c++-backend 'lsp-ccls) and lsp to the list of layers

4. install ccls with my distros package manager

5. restart emacs and get to work

Sure, there are some more steps, but i don't really see it as a burden. And oftentimes it's even easier than that - open a file, get prompted to automatically install the appropriate layer, wait a bit while it does it's thing and you're ready to go. Ok, you should also uncomment the git layer in the configuration but it's already there.

So yeah, i do recommend Spacemacs to the developers i know if they think they might be into a keyboard-centric experience to using the editor and other benefits that Emacs brings (buffer management is a big one for me). It was easy enough for me to jump on using it, without being familiar with Emacs beforehand and without knowing elisp. You do have to know basic vim, though.

2 comments

I use spacemacs in Holy mode, you don't actually need to know basic Vim. I use only emacs based key bindings.
How to use spacemacs on windows?
Emacs is available on Windows so just install it and then clone the Spacemacs GitHub repository to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\ and rename it to .emacs.d\ As i remember, though, i think it was slower than on Linux, but might be something else was going on with my setup back then.

I've also tried running it from WSL. Running it in cli mode was sufficient for me, but i was also able to use GUI mode by installing an X Server (VcXsrv i think) on Windows and making WSL work with that. It makes sense to use it from WSL, if you do your development work there as well. Also, it was before WSL 2, so i don't know if anything's changed now.