When comparing Crimson Editor vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Spacemacs for most people. In the question“What are the best simple text editors for Windows?” Spacemacs is ranked 11th while Crimson Editor is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Spacemacs is:
Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Project/Folder/Output pane
It can create a project that will be stored in a prj file, which is a text file that can be edited and used across systems. The folder pane navigation is limited to each disk drive. The output pane can be used to capture compilers or other exe's output, and also shows search output while searching in multiple files. You can just click on any line and it then opens the corresponding file in a new tab and shows you the needed line.
Pro Open last working files on start
Can open with all last worked documents - remembers all file positions.
Pro Free software
Pro Regular expressions support
Find and replace (multifile) allowed with support for regular expressions also.
Pro Macro editing
Repetitive lines or words can be recorded as a macro, kept and recalled when needed, since it is permanently stored (up to 11 macros).
Pro Spell check
Pro Return to last edit
Return to last edit option is very good during coding, where we can lose track of where we were.
Pro Column mode
The column mode editing trick, which we could do in MS Office (with ALT + mouse key), is also available.
Pro Very lightweight
Pro Can make a project and configure hot keys to call system commands to make it an IDE
Pro The text window can be split into two or four parts
Pro Custom syntax along with many known syntax and multi level key highlighting
Pro Supports tabs
Supports any number of tabs
Pro Preconfigured emacs distro
Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.
Pro VIM Keybindings with EMACS ecosystem
EMACS ecosystem and language support is best in show. The EMACS is a great IDE that was in search of a good text editor. Spacemacs makes EMACS have a good text editor.
Cons
Con Doesn't support dragging and dropping text
Con Further development not happening with the Emerald Community
Con Bookmarks are not permanent
Bookmarks are lost when a file is closed - just like any other editor.
Con Emacs is slow
Emacs is single threaded which means that if you enable all the great features you might be used to from Vim, it will run noticeably slower which can be quite frustrating at times. There are efforts at a concurrent Emacs, but they don't seem to be going anywhere.