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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

Spacemacs unfortunately suffers from slow startup speed and an unnecessary "layers" abstraction.

I could never use Emacs without vim keybindings, but I don't need to install Spacemacs to get that. It's as easy as

    package-install evil
    package-install evil-commentary
    package-install evil-leader
    package-install evil-org
    package-install evil-surround

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Have you tried doom-emacs? https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

It has an insane startup speed! I tried once and it opened within a second. I'm not an evil user myself, so don't know about the vim compatibility.

If you are interested in making the startup faster, check https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/wiki/FAQ#how-is-dooms... from the same author

Layers are not an abstraction, it's an organization-system for the configuration. Anyone who has more then a handful lines of configurations develops some system to avoid the infamous .emacs bankruptcy. And Spacemacs comes with dozen packages pre-configured, while offering the option to allow the user to choose from hundred more package-configurations.

Similar slow startup. Majority impact on spacemacs startup is the regular search for package updates. Without it the startup-time is relative tame, though there is of course some place for improvment if you aim for <1 sec-startups.

Your missing he part where you have to configure all those packages. Having new features already setup and integrated for me is a huge plus. It takes a lot of work to mimic something as well done as Spacemacs.

here's the total configuration required:

    (require 'evil)    
    (require 'evil-matchit)
    (require 'evil-surround)

    (evil-mode 1) 
    (global-evil-matchit-mode 1)
    (global-evil-surround-mode 1)
    (evil-commentary-mode)

judge for yourself whether this is too much work to paste into your .emacs

Spacemacs does a lot more than provide vim key bindings and modal editing.

The biggie to me is discoverability, with it's pneumonic key combos, and integrating with packages like helm.

Even with evil, the vim semantics are often violated in special buffers, making for a rather disjointed experience. Spacemacs also does a lot to smooth out a lot of those problems.

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