spacemacs is solid if you want to try out a well configured emacs. magit, org mode, helm are amazing tools and part of the killer feature list of emacs. magit is so good even if I stopped using emacs tomorrow I would still use it for my git gui.
Let's do this in realtime. I downloaded the latest Spacemacs.
1) Opening. Hmm, it's a zip not a DMG. Already losing me, but I'll stick, I'm not that shallow.
2) Hmm, it's just a bunch of source files? I guess the prominent "Download" link just gives you the configuration, not a bundled editor. I have to get Emacs from somewhere else. Grr... Lemme check their "Quickstart".
3) Yeah... the Quickstart link just gives you some BS that assumes you already know how to install this, and the "Install" button just gives a git command line to clone their repo. Back to square 1.
4) Fuck it, I'll use brew to install Emacs. Spacemacs doesn't even say which version of Emacs it works best with. I'll risk with what brew gives me.
5) Brew installation ends fine, with a caveat: "Please try the Cask for a better-supported Cocoa version". Now you tell me?
6) Anyway, I have an emacs, lemme git clone spacemacs now. OK, comes up, nice logo. Now, I have a huge emacs window -- so why is it asking me "first time" config questions in a tiny space at the bottom? And why doesn't it explain better what the various options (distro flavors) entail?
7) Let it do its install, then play around a bit. Close the window in evil mode (q!). I open emacs again, greeted with this:
Found 1 new package(s) to install...
--> refreshing package archive: gnu... [3/3]
--> installing package: evil-unimpaired@spacemacs-evil... [1/1]
An error occurred while installing evil-unimpaired (error: (wrong-type-
argument package-desc nil))
Warnings:
- Cannot find any of the specified fonts (Source Code Pro)! Font settings
may not be correct.
Error (use-package): helm :config: Symbol’s value as
variable is void: helm-bookmark-map
similarly, once you get to know the language quirks, it's a decent language that is basically a DSL for text editing. The power you get from being able to lookup how something was implemented by the text editor developers easily is extremely powerful.
If you like vim's idea of modal editing, emacs is 100% all about that. languages are major modes, minor modes are functions and keybindings that can be enabled and grouped together at will. transient buffers are used to send output to and are treated as normal buffers that you can do things to. The architecture and extensiblity of emacs is pretty amazing actually. Every key press is just a function and every key can be rebound based on current context using things like mode maps that get layered on top of everything and have precedence based on where you inserted the binding with sensible fallbacks when required.
Disclaimer: I love vim as a concept but hate viml and the plugins that were hampered by the lame programming language that was designed by bram.
if you have not tried magit and org mode you just don't really understand the power of emacs and the power of having everything be a function. spacemacs just makes setting up that powerful environment fairly painless but it's still a very old architecture with some warts.
However, the people generally working with/on emacs are not looking for that, they are looking for an editor optimized for customisation. They have already gone through the experience of setting it up, so why would they spend most of their time making it easier out of the box?
There is a cost to everything, and so far most people on emacs side have decided to spend their time on improving it's power, not it's ease of use.
you clicked on download instead of install. now, to be fair, download shouldn't be on the main screen imo but still install is more in line with what you were looking to do so it should have been the thing you clicked on. Cloning the repo is installing it if you have emacs installed already.
It's open source so this can verbiage can be fixed. It's not a stand alone editor as it's a bunch of configurations to emacs.
https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs has better onboarding docs than the homepage does.
At the end of the day it's a question of how much customization you want out of an editor. Reading the tone in your comment seems like you didn't want it to be successful at all anyway.