Why would you prefer spacemacs over emacs running on 'evil' mode? [closed]

Question

I like the eye-candy, but spacemacs does come with a greater speed penalty. What makes spacemacs worth keeping?

Centillion

Answer 1

Evil-mode is just a single Emacs package providing a minor mode to emulate vi-like features. There are thousands of "packages" that can be installed in various ways at any time.

Spacemacs is a full-blown, opinionated, kitchen-sink starter kit distribution. It features Evil-mode front-and-center, but also provides and configures many other ambitious packages like Helm, and themes, and its own necessary documentation (which seemed pretty good). Installation of starter kits is more involved than packages and is the starting point if you choose to use one.

You have to decide if you want to adopt the whole Spacemacs experience/philosophy, or rather just bring over your vi habits via Evil for some familiar bindings in a traditional Emacs. Doing the latter gives more flexibility -- you can individually add other packages that Spacemacs leverages.

After 15 years of Vim, I successfully switched to Emacs and opted to let Emacs just be Emacs and learn its natural bindings (still learning, of course!). I found this makes Emacs books, documentation, and people easier to make sense of, and now I don't miss the modal editing.

Wilkey

In my experience, emacs' native bindings are nowhere near as intuitive as vim/vi's own bindings, this after eventually getting the hang of emacs editing. For one, having your fingers at rest at the home row most of the time really makes vim extremely pleasant to use, as opposed to Emacs' finger-wrangling bindings. On the other hand, I've found that the best way to get accustomed to Emacs, coming from vim, is to remap vim's insert mode bindings to mimic Emacs keybindings up to a reasonable extent. Also, it makes Vim's insert mode way more interesting. – Centillion