When comparing lf vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Spacemacs for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for UNIX-like systems?” Spacemacs is ranked 23rd while lf is ranked 31st. 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 Uses a server/client architecture to share file selection between multiple instances
This lets you open lf in two different terminals or tabs and do things like copy something on one terminal to the other.
Pro ranger like ui
Pro Works on Windows
Pro Fast startup and low memory footprint due to native code and static binaries
Pro Single binary without any runtime dependencies except for terminfo database
Pro Configurable with shell commands
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 Lacks features
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.