When comparing GNU Nano vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends GNU Nano for most people. In the question“What are the best text editors for UNIX-like systems?” GNU Nano is ranked 6th while Spacemacs is ranked 14th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Comes with most Linux distros (and a lot of other UNIX-like OS's)
Pro Very easy to use
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 GNU
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.