When comparing IntelliJ Rust vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends IntelliJ Rust for most people. In the question“What are the best editors/IDEs for Rust?” IntelliJ Rust is ranked 1st while Spacemacs is ranked 11th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro A fully featured IDE
Pro Constantly being updated
Pro Full power of IDEA engine
This plugin uses big part of Intellij IDEA features, including advanced code analysis and refactoring.
Pro Free/Libre (MIT)
Currently
Pro Many users
Has more users than the average plugin.
Pro The best VI shortcut plugin
For those that favor VI shortcuts, you can do nearly everything in IntelliJ that you would do in a VIM editor. Almost no conflicts out of the box, and those that are in conflict are easily resolved.
Pro Built-in user friendly terminal
Pro Has built-in Git support
Pro Nearly 100% of Rust code is interpretted by the IDE
The ability to trace variable definitions and references from within closures as well as understand smart pointers and macro code makes it the smoothest interface for writing Rust.
Pro Supports JS/TS frameworks
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 Debugger requires paid CLion / IDEA Ultimate
Debugger still won't work without IDE that includes native debugger support. The only known is proprietary and paid CLion or IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate with the native debugger plugin.
Con Intellij Rust being replaced by paid for IDE
Con Why would you pay for it if there is VSCode
Con Too many issues (currently, in May 2022)
The plugin mostly works but it has a staggering number of issues (1400+ reported as of today). Therefore it should not be used if tool stability is an issue.
Con From the website: "work-in-progress, expect bugs and missing features"
Con Slow compared to Rust analyzer
Con Difficult to work with substrate
Con Does not parse macros correctly
It seems that autocomplete does not work for macros at all.
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.