Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Mnemonic and consistent key bindings
Key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces, for instance buffer actions are under b
, file actions under f
, project actions under p
, search actions under s
etc...
Key bindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions.
Pro Configuration Layer Architecture
At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful allowing to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages.
Pro Great support
The community is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat to ask for questions.
Pro Great support from the community
The community surrounding Spacemacs is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat for users to ask questions.
Pro Simple but powerful configuration architecture
At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful, allowing the user to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages.
Cons
Con Even though has vim keybindings it will still feel unfamiliar to vim users
Con Slow startup time
Although configuration is heavily lazy loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. It can be considered a disadvantage but it has to be noted that Emacs can be run as a daemon which basically reduces the clients startup time to a few milliseconds.
Con Requires prior experience in Vim or Emacs
They have a very poor guide to new users who are not familiar with this type of editor. You should have experience using Vi(-m) or Emacs. Spacemacs is distributed based on Emacs, so you should learn the basic of Emacs. This is not a means to learn from the Emacs's original distribution(GNU Emacs) rather than Spacemacs. Although the advantages of Spacemacs can offset the fundamental difficulty of Emacs, it means that you have to learn another new features and modes beyond the Emacs.
Con High CPU and unresponsive at times
There are occasions when Spacemacs would suddenly consume a LOT of CPU and then other times would become completely unresponsive. This instability took place only 6 months or so ago. Restarting Spacemacs can fix it for a while but perhaps this issue is already fixed in newer versions.
Con Can be quite glitchy at times
Spacemacs combines many packages from many different authors that were never designed to work together. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways, and things randomly break as one package interferes with another's features. This combined with delayed auto-loading of packages in unpredictable order, different modes for different file types, frequent package updates, and necessary customization by selection of layers and packages, can make these glitches hard to reproduce. It takes a lot of emacs know-how to fix these problems. Fortunately there is a very active community willing to help with these problems, but it might take a while.