Sometimes I wish I initially spent my time learning emacs. Vim has been great to me. I don't value programming workflows as much as I used to so I'm not going through that steep learning curve again
> Sometimes I wish I initially spent my time learning emacs. Vim has been great to me.
One of the key things I found though is that I learned to compose tools outside of vi rather than rely on the editor functionality. This was applicable to much larger problem domains than just editing. The Unix philosophy of using lots of small well defined things to solve problems applies to editing text.
I still find myself reaching for Vim when I want to just write a simple script. Emacs, VS Code, etc. can just be too much sometimes.
I realised that if I'd started minimal I would have reinvented so many of the spacemacs wheels, but done it worse.
Spacemacs could do with being slightly more user friendly. It gives you a lot of friendliness already, but to prevent people from being frightened off by emacs' formidable reputation it really needs to "work" out of the box. For me that would be one click install and a reasonable suite of IDE-like features for working with a given language pre-configured. That would include scripting to install the command line tools that they shell out to, e.g. ag or rg.
It replaced vim on the cli for me.
I used to do this too. What stopped me was that I often use emacs as a terminal multiplexer with vterm, and it becomes super difficult to control vim if you have evil-mode capturing those same inputs. In the end oh-my-zsh (more crappy bloat like spacemacs which I love to bits) has an alias called "e" which will open a file for editing in your current emacs.
(If only it worked through docker! Or maybe it does and I just don't understand TRAMP well enough yet.)