The difference in Emacs vs Vim is Emacs-Lisp. This means Spacemacs is incredibly more powerful than Spacevim from a conceptual point of view. Emacs is a living

The difference in Emacs vs Vim is Emacs-Lisp. This means Spacemacs is incredibly more powerful than Spacevim from a conceptual point of view. Emacs is a living, self-documenting environment and Spacemacs extends it quite a lot. This Lisp environment is very different from a set of plugins developed offline or mere configurations. Calling Spacemacs a bunch of plugins and configuration is like calling any conventional program a plugin of its language and runtime. Plugins attach to an environment with a specific runtime API, instead of extending said API, blurring the line between runtime and extension in the process.