When you get notified that the file has changed on disk, and is different from your current buffer:

file has changed since visited or saved.  Save anyway?

Then

M-x diff-buffer-with-file

is very useful for seeing what has actually changed.

I tend to get this when I’ve changed something org-related via orgzly on my mobile while I was also changing something on my laptop.

In case it helps anyone, here are the steps I needed to take to get geben working in spacemacs in order to debug local web apps (this in Ubuntu 16.04):

  • Add geben package to .spacemacs and reload
 dotspacemacs-additional-packages '(some-other-package geben)

  • Assuming you have xdebug installed, add the following to your php.ini file in /etc/php/7.1/apache2/php.ini
[xdebug]

xdebug.remote_enable=On

xdebug.remote_host=localhost

xdebug.idekey=geben

xdebug.remote_autostart=On
  • Open the file you’re interested in debugging
  • Start geben in spacemacs with M-x geben
  • Navigate to localhost/some-app.php in a browser

That should trigger geben. Debugging time!

A bonus note: I didn’t have any luck with geben-find-file when trying to add breakpoints to other files in the project, but using geben-open-file worked (just a little bit more cumbersome.)

Really impressed by spacemacs  so far.  I started out with Emacs back in the day.  Switched to Vim at some point.  Spent the last 7 years or so using Visual Studio with the fantastic VsVim plugin.  After a while I began to see Vim more as a great set of keybindings, not so much as a program to proselytise in its own right.   Most text editors will have a Vim keybindings plugin.  Now, after moving to new work and away from the Microsoft stack, Spacemacs is seeming like a great system – very very thorough Vim bindings support, but with a very powerful and well-though out system underneath that.
Spacemacs was completely unresponsive at startup.  Turns out, for whatever reason, it was after I was using my laptop in a new place, and based on this FAQ obviously the ISP there was doing something funky: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/develop/doc/FAQ.org#why-is-spacemacs-hanging-on-startup.

Adding the settings there to the user-init function did the trick:

(setq tramp-ssh-controlmaster-options
      "-o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPath='tramp.%%C' -o ControlPersist=no")