@amashi: Actually I never understood all the emacs crowds going wild over it again and again. Things like these, that happened to you, happened to me everytime I wanted to try emacs and everytime I did that after a few days of almost zero productivity I just grabbed a different tool. Also updates break existing functionality regularly in emacs and then everybody goes and fixes it for himself?

I’ve been a vi/vim stalwart since 1989 but Spacemacs converted me to Emacs (Spacemacs in evil-mode, of course). I’ve only had one Emacs update in OS X fail me and I just went back to the previous version (thanks to Homebrew). I’ve had a few MELPA package updates break but Spacemacs makes it painless to roll back to a previous package versions, too. I’m not against cursive or IntelliJ or Atom or whatever. Go for the tool fits your workflow the best. Emacs (and vim) have stood the test of time for a similar reason, I believe. Then again, back in ’89, we regularly had to put up with far steeper learning curves so maybe that’s part of it as well.

@akiva: I cannot into spacemacs because I can't understand it. I can understand a system I build from scratch (the number of plugins I throw into vim), but spacemacs just seems so huge. I've managed to get (neo)vim really productive for clojure. Spacemacs seems like a way to use vim, but access emacs ecosystem of packages.

That’s basically it, yeah, although with recent versions during installation you can choose to go full-blown vim, use Emacs keybindings, or, I think, some combination between the two. Even though it does include a lot, it’s configured by the maintainers to feel cohesive, and you can easily include/exclude packages. For example, it doesn’t out of the box come with Clojure support. It’s something that has to be enabled.

Then again, Emacs itself is huge; there’s a reason it’s described as an operating system as well as a text editor.

+1 on spacemacs here

all you need to know about spacemacs is in one config file

I havent had a need to go further than that honestly

it just works

heh