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Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Spacemacs a few months ago and didn't look back since. Its basically Emacs+Vim+Steroids+More.

Just the leader key and layers alone are incredibly powerful concepts Spacemacs brings on top of Emacs/Vim :)

I can't stand Spacemacs. It's too complicated. I'd rather write my own config, thanks.

I also tried spacemacs multiple times. It helped me completely re-designing my vim config into layers but in the end I wasn't 100% happy with it. It is way too heavy, comes with too many batteries and does so much magic that troubleshooting a problem becomes increasingly difficult.

But I can highly recommend anyone to give it a try. It's a good example how you can split configs into smaller packages and do keybindings the right way.

I went back to neovim and re-wrote my vimrc from scratch. With mnemonic keybindings, layered config and all the likes

Did you switch to Spacemacs from Emacs or vim? I tried getting into Spacemacs from vim and found it quite overwhelming with all the config files and additional configuration that I had to do so instead I went for just Emacs + EVIL mode and built from there. I've gotten pretty used to Emacs and Elisp now, would it be worth it giving Spacemacs another shot?

i tried switching from vim to spacemacs but all i got was a bunch of keybinds brought back to my .vimrc such as <space>fs instead of :w (:update) that saves my right pinky for less used commands.

I switched from Emacs, had already read https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878 a few months prior which got me REALLY curious about Vim. I was using Emacs Prelude before and spent vast amounts of time customising my Emacs.

Then coworkers suggested spacemacs after I talked about an Emacs/Vim hybrid and tried it afterwards, oh boy :)

The main advantages of Spacemacs, IMO, are its community creating good quality layers, the concept of layers itself (think of it as a group for a major mode and its associated minor modes - makes config a lot cleaner), running almost everything through helm-mode (which isn't fun to integrate that well yourself), and its space leader key (hence spacemacs) on top of helm-mode giving you self-documenting navigation through every single command.

So saving files becomes "space f s" opening files is "space f f" and if you idle a few seconds at any point helm-mode shows you all the possible options, so its very easy to learn gradually.

I gotta admit I jumped headfirst into its tutorial and when I had completed it went on to read the full Spacemacs documentation, so most of the the learning curve was rather easy over a week or two, yet months later I'm still learning new things :)

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