When comparing Dark Room vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Spacemacs for most people. In the question“What are the best distraction-free word processors?” Spacemacs is ranked 9th while Dark Room is ranked 12th. 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 Portable
As long as the target machine has .NET Framework 2.0 or later installed (and most Windows machines do by default) the software can be run without requiring an install. It can be carried around on an external device, such as a USB thumbstick, and run directly from that.
Pro Decent customization options
Pro Completely free
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 Requires .NET to be installed
It depends on .NET before it is able to run.
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.