A First Look At SpaceVim

so my text editor of choice in the last few months has been doomed max which is a distribution of emacs that uses the evil key bindings the vm key bindings and it's really fantastic doomy max comes with a lot of sensible defaults a lot of plugins already installed for you some turned on some not turned on but it's really easy to enable or disable the plugins you want to use or don't want to use with doom emacs doomy max is fantastic i've done a lot of videos on it but some of the vim fan boys have been a little upset at me because i moved from vim over to doom emacs they're like hey you didn't have to go to do me max vim has distributions set up just like doom emacs you could have checked out a distribution of vim such as space film and they're right i should check out space film so today i'm going to do a quick first look and first impression of space film i don't know anything about this particular project other than it's a distribution of vm and again it's going to have some plug-ins you know it's going to look really nice out of the box you shouldn't have to do much with it that's kind of the point of these distributions of vm and the distributions of emacs such as space max and doomy max is that it's already set up for you you shouldn't have to spend hours and hours or in some cases weeks or months configuring the thing right it should be set up for you ready to go out of the box it's supposed to be really good especially for the new user right if you're new to them or you're new to emacs getting one of these pre-built distributions is really a godsend because as a new user you're not going to have any idea how to write that config and set up everything you want to set up so something like space vim is great for the new user because it gives you some ideas of what the editor can be so let me jump right into this thing what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into their documentation i will say first impression their website and their documentation looks good if i go to their quick start guide i believe this is where i will find the installation instructions yeah here's the install for linux and mac os and there is a installation guide for windows i'm going to of course use the linux install guide and it looks like we install it simply with the curl command so we pull down this bash script with curl and then of course run it now this can be dangerous it's not something you typically want to do unless you really trust somebody you don't want to just go curl some script onto your system and then run it in your shell but of course space vim is a rather large project i trust them with this so what i need to do is pull up a terminal and let me zoom in here so you guys can see this and i'm going to go ahead and paste that curl command and it should just be a one command install okay and that was really nice so we got a little bit of what it was doing and installed space vim for vim and installed space vim for neovim because i'm actually a neo-vim user my vm is actually neo-vim it detected that so i guess anytime i launch either vim or neovim i'm gonna launch space film that's interesting uh checked for some power line fonts mainly deja vu sans mono and droid sans mono and also ubuntu mono all for power line so let's get started with this thing so if it's installed let me vim space dot bash rc let's open my bash rc and uh space film here and i will say the colors are not bad they're using the gruff box colors not my favorite color scheme but it is a popular color scheme a lot of people like using it uh i was it's got the nice power line effects and everything i was actually a little surprised i didn't get a like a proper home page or a greeter page like you getting something like space max or doomy max maybe the problem was i specify to file them so if i launch vm with no other arguments and then i get the home page the greeter page and you get something written in some ascii art here i'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to be it says hi there okay i see and it's kind of tough to read that particular ascii art and then we have our most recent documents we've opened in film so that's kind of neat we have a file viewer over here this is this nerd tree no according to the description down here at the bottom in the status line this is the vim filer plug-in i've never actually used that plug-in i've never actually heard of that plug-in that's interesting so that would be interesting to know about by the way this plug-in here that i guess the start page here is startify as that's another vim plugin that i have never heard of so space film already i can tell you is going to be interesting for me because it's going to introduce me to some vim plugins that i did not previously know about and in the startify page you see we have our recent files that we opened up in film off camera i did open up the space vim init file i'm going to show you that here in a minute i was a little worried when i ran that curl script i wasn't sure what it was going to do to my vmrc and my neo-vim init file as well and you see config nvm underscore backup and net.vm it creates a backup of your neo-vim config so don't worry it won't overwrite anything i mean it will override everything but it creates a backup you're going to have a vmrc underscore backup and i think you're going to have a nvm underscore back directory as well so all of your stuff is backed up so if i click 0 on the keyboard so you see i have e for empty buffer and then 0 through 11. if i hit 0 i can get bash rc i'm assuming and that is in fact what happens here and again we've got the default colors the graph box colors and i would assume that if i hit space on the keyboard similar to what you do in doomy max space and then all right we get some hints as far as some of the other commands that we can do so if i do space and then a for applications you know that would give me probably another menu or space and then b for buffers well let's do that so i've already hit space let's do b for buffers and then it gives me the next list of commands you know for buffers next buffer previous buffer i probably kill a buffer or delete a buffer yeah i see that in the list as well right now i only have the bash rc up so i really can't do much with the buffers but let me open up another uh program here or another document to view here so if i do how about i just do a colon vs for vertical split and let me open up my zsh rc file so we have two different buffers going on actually i'd have a third buffer because vim filer i would assume would also be a buffer as well so now let me do space b for buffer and then if i do n for next buffer right let's see the bash rc goes to the next buffer which is zshrc so if i do space b in again space b and again okay well there's only two buffers to work with so there's not much to do here but anyway and we also have tabs at the top i just noticed that by default space film does have tabs enabled that's pretty cool although i'm not really sure i need the tabs if i'm going to use a split i probably wouldn't have opened the split the way i did had i known that it was going to do this but let me just go ahead and close that split actually let me see if the standard key bindings work if i do control w c for close or window close and that works as well let me actually open up the space vim init file so if i do colon to get back into command mode i'm going to do colon e we're going to edit a file the init file for space vim is in your home directory at dot space vm dot d because it's a hidden directory so dot space vim dot d and then a net dot tumble and if i hit enter and this is the default a knit dot tomml and there's not much to it you know i expected this thing to just be full of all kinds of crap because you know space film you know it's got so much going on there's really not much to it the color scheme by default is grov box there are some other color schemes if i get back into command mode and do color scheme and then just tab to see the available color schemes we have space vim which is just the default uh theme which is growth box we have blue dark blue default delic desert elf ford or however the hell you pronounce that industry pablo peachbuff these are all the standard default kind of vm color schemes so they're nothing special but gruff box it looks like it's the one they want to go with it's kind of popular i'm surprised i didn't see solarized in the list that's another really popular one had solarized dark been in the list i'd switch to that because i'd prefer that i didn't see other popular color schemes like dracula also wasn't in the list but it's very easy to change the the color scheme all you got to do is change the color scheme from grove box over to one of the available color schemes like delic or dessert or desert or whatever you have status line separators equals the arrows i guess you could change that to other values as well other than that you have some other stuff here layers autocomplete i guess this has something to do with the auto completion feature within space vim other than that if you want to figure out how to configure it i guess we need to get into the documentation so if i go to the documentation tab here and interface elements color schemes we just talked about that fonts when can you change the fonts now vm is a terminal application so yeah you could add this line gui font equals source code pro is what their example is that's interesting so if i go here and let me just add a new line here and we've got that line commented out if i write that that's a gooey font though it's not a terminal font i have source code pro on the system though you know what let me change this and let me see if it actually works and i'll change it to uh h15 here because i really want to know if it changes it should be pretty obvious if the font all of a sudden becomes bigger but if i do a colon wq for write and quit and then get back into vim uh yeah it's still the same right or did it change it does look like it changed didn't it let me get the bash rc open or is that the same font as before i think it is the same size that's hard to tell isn't it let me do a colon and then let me get back to this command here let's go ahead and edit this let me edit it to a really big font size so i i thought 15 would be obvious but i guess it's not let's see if 18 is obvious that's obviously that that didn't change so i don't think that that made any difference here which i didn't think it would because why would it for one thing i misspelled the the font too all right now that i've spilled it correctly let's try it and i still didn't change it so i don't think this line actually does anything because gui font you know again that's for g vim right that's for the gui version of the mg vim vm in our terminal there's really no way to do anything with the fonts because vim by default does not handle fonts right the fonts are entirely handled by the terminal emulator that you're running vm in so i wouldn't think that line would work unless you know what let me write and quit out of that i didn't think about this gvm gvm does work although i don't think source code pro the gui font i said i don't think it's actually working because that's not source code pro so let me get back into uh well i actually i guess i could just do this in gvm itself let me where is the spacevim init.toml i'm just going to delete this line for now i'll just use whatever default font they have here right and quit that and i'm going to relaunch gfilm yeah i like that and that is actually more like doomy max and spacemax in that it is an actual gui program yeah and that's probably the way i would use space film now that i know that you can use it as either vim neovim or vim i think it makes more sense to use it in the graphical form gvm because that really could give you access to things you normally would never have in terminal based bim for example because gvm is a graphical application you know it could display images if it if you needed to display images emojis you could also use plugins that do interesting graphical stuff for example many people love having a mini map you know on the side of the screen you know you guys have seen the mini-map that editors like sublime text for example come with or even you know some of the plain text editors in linux such as kdes kate you know or is it k right one of them has a mini map and you can't really do that in terminal based vim because it has to use the exact font that the terminal emulator is using the exact font phase the exact font size and all it can do i guess to kind of mimic a mini map is display maybe like braille dots or something but it really doesn't look good and it really doesn't give you any idea of where you're at in this very lengthy document where gbim you could actually install a mini map plugin and it would actually look right it would look like any other mini map plug-in in a gui text editor like sublime or whatever so yeah this is interesting one thing i don't like though is i really don't like that the film filer is not showing me my hidden files and directories i wonder if there's a way to toggle that on and off i'm actually looking through the space max documentation at the moment and i cannot find a way to do that if i just do a search here i'm actually in firefox if i do a search for hidden because i'm assuming somewhere on this page it would mention hidden files or directories it does not it mentions the keybinding though to toggle the vm filer on and off f3 or you could use space ft okay well that's interesting at least i know the key binding to toggle it on and off so for me i would just use space ft space ft all right space ft okay that works so what otherwise has been fantastic documentation i will say the space film guys need to document how i get hidden files and directories in the vim filer because it's it's almost useless if it won't show me the hidden files because so many files that you edit on a regular basis especially on linux are dot files you know config files you know so uh yeah we need to fix that maybe i should file a bug report with the space film guys when i'm done with the video so let me pull up a graphical file manager since uh vim filer is not really working for me at the moment since i can't actually get into a hidden directory because i want to get into dot space film and dot space film dot d i'm not sure what's going on in these directories i know dot space film dot d is the one that has our init dot toml our config file but dot space vim without the d i think is the directory that has all the plugins yeah it's down here is it bundle yeah all right so these are vim plugins and it has a lot of them oh i wasn't aware it was this many plugins on here if i just do a ctrl a to select everything it looks like there's 61 items when that includes the readme so it looks like 60 items so 60 plugins let me just go through the list here i'll point out some of the ones that stand out to me that i recognize just right off the bat i do notice that they have a nerd tree here so i could use nerd tree instead of vim filer which may be what i would end up doing if i can't get vim file or to actually show me the dot files also i noticed in the list here fortran.vim so that's a vm plugin i'm assuming for people that are programming in fortran that is weird that they would include that that is very strange looks like we also have the nerd commenter plugin that's very popular tabular is a very popular plugin film airline is the power line effect going on i'm assuming which makes sense i've always found velm airline to be a little more reliable as far as it doesn't tend to be a hassle and break as much as the standard power line package in vim i never could get powerline to work consistently across all terminal emulators but vim airline seems to take care of that of course we have the vm airline themes because you can theme the powerline to be a different color scheme if you want it uh vmstartify against the start page jumps around is a very popular plugin as well looking through their keybindings right now i do notice one odd thing i was looking for how to do splits here i mean obviously you can always do colon split and colon v split and i i do know the commands to do it with the control key you could do control w v for vertical split you know but uh i was going to see if they had any simpler key bindings or maybe key bindings that involved the space key here in space vim but it looks like for splits you do sv and sg but sv is not a vertical split yes v is i think the horizontal split s g is the vertical split that makes no sense but let's try it out i'm interested so if i do sv yeah that's a horizontal split which is kind of cool now if i go back up here and i do s g you know that's really what i would consider a vertical split and that's actually what really is a vertical split in uh vim because colon vs of course gets you that same effect which is the vertical split i know it's confusing some people call vertical splits horizontal splits and horizontal splits vertical splits because i mean is this really a vertical split i would say it is because it it splits two columns you know vertical columns but some people would say well you split it you know so you got two things side by side and a horizontal pattern it's kind of weird you know so you know in emacs this is really a horizontal split but in vm it's really a vertical split and it's confusing but i wish they would change that key binding because i think sv makes more sense for the vertical split in instead of sg now in space max and doomy max you can navigate splits using key bindings that use the space key space w for space window space w and then hjkl the navigation keys the standard vm navigation keys so if i do space w l i move to the split over on the right if i do space w j for down i move to the split down here if i do space wk to move up i move back up into that split well that's kind of cool i wonder if i can close a split with space wc now space wc is not bound but i could always just use one of the standard vm key bindings which is ctrl w c to close okay that works control wc again to close that split now one very important thing i want to take a look at because you know one of the really neat things that i love about doom emacs is how easy it is to add and remove emacs plugins emacs extensions and i want to see if i can get that same kind of ease of use in something like space bim how easy is it to install your own custom plugins because by default the init dot tomml for space vim i don't see like any list of plugins or anything you know how do i go about adding plugins let me review the documentation here and there is a plugin section it talks about updating you know the default plugins that come with it but they do have this one little section here add custom plugins if you want to add plugins from github just add the repo name to the custom plugins section so we need to create a custom plugin section i'm assuming to our init dot tomml let's see if that actually works i'm kind of curious about this myself so i just added their example plugin which is the colorizer plugin i guess that's not something that ships by default with space film so let me do a colon wq for write and quit now let me relaunch gvm if i can type correctly and i don't know if it actually installed that colorizer plug-in or not i guess i need to find something that has some colors you know i know my uh x-resources file has some hex colors in it so let's do our x resources file let me get down here to where the hex colors are these are all commented outlines here's some hex colors but they are not highlighted in any way let me get back into the documentation here update plugins colon capital s p update okay let's try that so let me get back over here so you guys can see this sp update and colorizer is in the list here and it says updating done so i guess it did install this uh this plugin so i don't know why it didn't colorize my x resources colors there but maybe it just doesn't like these kinds of hex value colors maybe it just does it for rgb value colors or something like that i'm not sure what's going on but it installed the plugin it's just doesn't seem to be working correctly but that's how you install the plugins though if i go back here to the net tunnel you just create this new section custom underscore plugins and then you list your plugins under there where repo equals the repo from github and i think that's where i'm going to quit with this very quick cursory look at space vim this was a first look first impression kind of video because i thought this would be really neat coming at it from a brand new user because that's kind of what space vim is supposed to be for it's supposed to be for the new vm user they actually on their website say it's for the elementary quote elementary vm user so somebody that really doesn't know anything about vm because if you don't know anything about them how are you going to know how to turn vm into a ide you're not going to know all the plugins you need you know you're not going to know about all the completion plugins and the language syntax plugins and things like the colorizer plugins and nerd tree and vinfiler and things like that you're gonna have to do serious research and it can be confusing to get into that stuff if you don't know what you're doing you know space film just takes care of all that stuff and it did kind of overwrite you know my configs like mrc and my neo-mrc i mean it backed them up i still have them but i'm not sure if i'm going to restore my standard neo-vim config i may actually just leave space i'm on the system i'm seriously thinking about just using this as vim for a while of course i'm going to spend most of my time and do me max because new me max is my preferred text editor but anytime i launch film i think what i'm going to do is just launch space film it's already aliased i think any uh anyway anytime you i launch vim right now it actually launches space vim so i think that's just what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna keep using this as vm every time i open up them because i just think it's a neat project and i'm really glad that i checked this out a lot of you guys have been asking about this a lot of uvm users especially hey check out space vim i actually am very impressed with this project it it has a great website the documentation is pretty fantastic if you go check out their github a lot of people are actually working on this they claim it's a community driven vm distribution and it really is it looks like they have dozens of active people working on the project so definitely check it out if you are a vim user or if you're thinking about getting into vm maybe give space vm a try now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show michael gabe corbinian mitchell devon fran arch 5530 comedy channel chill claudio donny dylan george greg caleb devils lewis paul scott and willie they are the producers of the show they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names are seeing on the screen right now each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace now how do i exit out of them

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 119,227

Rating: 4.914402 out of 5

Keywords: linux, gnu linux, vim, neovim, gvim, spacevim, spacemacs, doom emacs, emacs, vim text editor, vim editor, vim vs emacs, vim vs vscode, vim vs sublime, vim ide, spacevim tutorial, spacevim review, vim plugins, vscode vim, text editor, text editors, linux text editors, ide for programming, best ide for programming languages, vim editor in linux, vim editor commands

Id: iXPS_NHLj9k

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Rben10_senpai]

I started to learn vim yesterday, can vim do everything that a normal text editor can do or its better.

Or just learn it anyway.