To play devil's advocate here. you clicked on download instead of install. now, to be fair, download shouldn't be on the main screen imo but still install is m

To play devil's advocate here. you clicked on download instead of install. now, to be fair, download shouldn't be on the main screen imo but still install is more in line with what you were looking to do so it should have been the thing you clicked on. Cloning the repo is installing it if you have emacs installed already. It's open source so this can verbiage can be fixed. It's not a stand alone editor as it's a bunch of configurations to emacs. https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs has better onboarding docs than the homepage does. At the end of the day it's a question of how much customization you want out of an editor. Reading the tone in your comment seems like you didn't want it to be successful at all anyway.