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I've been meaning to try neovim, but I'm so in love with evil-mode spacemacs. I only switched to evil-mode recently, but I can already tell that there's no going back from modal editing for me. Can anybody speak for benefits of using neovim over spacemacs?

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Simplicity. It's just Vim, but with less suck.

Spacemacs is a huge complex mass of software on top of another. I could not digest it.

But, if you're already happy and productive with Spacemacs, it's unlikely you'll gain too much with Neovim.

I have to agree that Spacemacs is seriously complex. I first cam to it because I wanted to try Emacs coming from Vim/nvim but it suffered from prettt bad load times, a bad C/C++ story and a leaky abstraction over packages. I'm the end I configured Emacs from vanilla (with Evil mode!) and I've had a much better time. I've also picked up quite a bit of elisp, which is much much much better than VimL.

Start emacs-client at startup and you'll only have to deal with the load time on boot. Also, you can do a minimal Spacemacs install. It's not actually all that complex if you look under the hood, and a really nice thing about it is that you only have one dotfile to back up on a git remote or few.

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