I don't know if you find spacemacs disturbingly slow while editing or just when it starts. I was disturbed by the latter and have emacs set up to run in daemon

I don't know if you find spacemacs disturbingly slow while editing or just when it starts. I was disturbed by the latter and have emacs set up to run in daemon mode and have the following in my .bashrc: function em() { emacsclient -nw "$@" } so that I can call "em" with any necessary arguments and start an emacs session without having to wait. Works for me (though depending on the language I might still prefer vim).