What is Spacemacs

I’ve been a pure Vim user for many years before I stumbled on Spacemacs.

So what is it?

Spacemacs is a community driven distribution of Emacs. The tagline is The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim!. It’s pretty much Emacs with a well structured configuration system (via something called “Layers”). You can choose to use Vim like keybindings (or what Emacs people call evil).

I quite like Spacemacs :).

Searching and Replacing in Multiple Files

A cool trick I learned recently is the ability to search and replace in multiple files.

  • With helm-ag you can search through all files in your projectile project with SPC / or SPC s p.
  • Enter your search query and a list of files with that occurrence will show up
  • Then hit C-c C-e and Spacemacs will create a helm-ag-edit buffer
  • Now you can use any command you’d normally be able to run on a buffer. For example, a simple Vim search and replace %s/alice/bob/g.
  • Then hit C-c C-c to save the changes.

Pretty nifty!

I recommend you try out Spacemacs. It has become my daily editor of choice. You can also check out my personal Spacemacs configuration (.spacemacs) in my dotfiles.

That’s it for now.

Peace ✌🏽