> I've always said that it's better to grasp Emacs with a vanilla config or a small starter kit and see if you can make it grow step by step in a journey that t

> I've always said that it's better to grasp Emacs with a vanilla config or a small starter kit and see if you can make it grow step by step in a journey that takes years. I moved to Spacemacs becaues I wanted to write clojure without maintaining my own Clojure IDE in vim+tmux (this was around 2014, maybe 2015). I was productive in Spacemacs in around 10 minutes. I went from never using Emacs to fixing bugs and writing extensions in Emacs in less than two weeks because Spacemacs pervasively uses which-key to provide discoverability and had vim-style shortcuts I could use for real work (rather than learning a new set of keybindings). The groupings of things into layers makes studying what ecosystem packages provide what functionality much easier than blindly googling "how to do X in emacs" and getting 3000 "unique" (read: half-baked if you're lucky) solutions. This idea that you should suffer for hours/days/weeks building your init.el from scratch while adapting to terminology, keybindings, and a lack of familiarity with the ecosystem is absolutely insane. If you can use vi, you're better off with Spacemacs.