Had the same experience, spacemacs has nice defaults and it's gorgeous, but the lag bothered me so much that I was using vim a lot of time to get things to work

Had the same experience, spacemacs has nice defaults and it's gorgeous, but the lag bothered me so much that I was using vim a lot of time to get things to work. Changed to a clean configuration and built it slowly, everytime I hit an annoyance I fixed and learned something new, now it works better than spacemacs for my workflow and still is way snappier.