I think there are weird things about spacemacs. It’s probably somewhat good for someone who doesn’t know any emacs because a lot of the emacs defaults are bad.

I think there are weird things about spacemacs. It’s probably somewhat good for someone who doesn’t know any emacs because a lot of the emacs defaults are bad. And for someone who wants vim bindings it’s good because it has a lot more than evil mode does. On the other hand I feel like a lot of the layers are developed by people who spend too much time tinkering with editor features trying to make the most complicated thing in the process. And this means they’re not bothered by needing to tweak configs all the time, and they are frequently restarting emacs so they don’t notice things like the terrible performance it can give people who use emacs in the more normal way of opening emacs on Monday morning and not killing many buffers all week. The complexity can leave you with weird bugs. For example if you use regular emacs (X forwarding over a network) on X displays with different dpis, your text will look the same (physical) size on both. If you use spacemacs it can be wrong on one because of some hack someone added somewhere in that tower of complexity. There are plenty of other oddities in there. Also as soon as one advances to wanting slightly more customisation, it can be really hard to do it with spacemacs. Whereas with regular emacs it’s quite easy to go from basically zero to some.