Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Mnemonic and consistent key bindings
Key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces, for instance buffer actions are under b
, file actions under f
, project actions under p
, search actions under s
etc...
Key bindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions.
Pro Simple but powerful configuration architecture
At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful allowing to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages.
Pro Great support from the community
The community is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat to ask for questions.
Pro Mnemonic and consistent keybindings
Space-lead key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces. For instance, buffer actions are under SPC b
, file actions are under SPC f
, project actions are under SPC p
, search actions are under SPC s
, and so on. Keybindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions.
Cons
Con Relative low startup time
Although configuration is heavily loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. Emacs can be run as a daemon though which reduces the client's startup time to a few milliseconds. Still not as bad as other editors though, especially Electron based ones like VSCode or Atom.
Con Requires prior experience in Vim or Emacs
They have a very poor guide to new users who are not familiar with this type of editor. You should have experience using Vi(-m) or Emacs. Spacemacs is distributed based on Emacs, so you should learn the basic of Emacs. This is not a means to learn from the Emacs's original distribution(GNU Emacs) rather than Spacemacs. Although the advantages of Spacemacs can offset the fundamental difficulty of Emacs, it means that you have to learn another new features and modes beyond the Emacs.
Con Can be quite glitchy at times
Spacemacs combines many packages from many different authors that were never designed to work together. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways, and things randomly break as one package interferes with another's features. This combined with frequent package updates and necessary customization by selection of layers and packages, can make these glitches hard to reproduce. It takes a lot of emacs know-how to fix these problems. Fortunately there is a very active community willing to help with these problems, but it might take a while.
Con High CPU and unresponsive at times
There are occasions when Spacemacs would suddenly consume a LOT of CPU and at other times would become completely unresponsive. Restarting Spacemacs would always fix it for a while. It was just really unstable and this was only 6 months or so ago. May be fixed in newer versions.