Spacemacs does a good job of _not_ dropping you back to emacs keybindings, though on occasion it still happens. I've not yet worked out how - my only recourse a

Spacemacs does a good job of _not_ dropping you back to emacs keybindings, though on occasion it still happens. I've not yet worked out how - my only recourse as someone who has never used Emacs without Spacemacs in Evil mode is to restart it... The startup time compared to vim is painful, and the daemon mode on OS X appears not to work. For project work I use it heavily, but for quick edits still fall back to vim. I've yet to test whether neovim gets rid of the UI blocking that made vim so unusable for me though.