When comparing Pantheon Files vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Pantheon Files for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for UNIX-like systems?” Pantheon Files is ranked 20th while Spacemacs is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Pantheon Files is:
Pantheon files (like the Pantheon IDE) is very stylish and minimal. It's minimal and very easy to use. The most useful commands are there in plain sight, on the toolbar or the sidebar.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy to use
Pantheon files (like the Pantheon IDE) is very stylish and minimal. It's minimal and very easy to use. The most useful commands are there in plain sight, on the toolbar or the sidebar.
Pro supports natural sorting of file names
Dolphin and Deepin File Manager support it, too.
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 Buggy
Was missing basic network connect features when Loki launched.
Con Not very advanced
Pantheon files (like Elementary OS itself) does not offer many advanced features since it's mostly aimed at beginners.
Con Unstable software, not a file-manager
really, really dangerous stuff.
Crashes and take your work/files into the nowhere - aware.
Con Not intunitive
In some instances it is impossible to create a new folder. There just isn't right-click option or icon for it anywhere.
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.