I suggest working with just evil mode for a bit, or going all the way with vanilla emacs. Spacemacs is great, but overwhelming. Also, spacemacs should not be used in sensitive contexts, because it is a massive security hole: it brings in a vast number of melpa packages, the git repositories for any one of which could be compromised. And whenever spacemacs updates, it updates all those packages for you, and melpa updates a package on any new commit to the source git repository.