at least for me, it feels like i have to change my whole workflow to match spacemacs, instead of being the other way around (i, being able to easily config spacemacs to match my current vim workflow).
it honestly felt really backwards to use spacemacs after ~10y of vim usage. i would prefer to learn plain emacs + evil mode instead.
I'm relieved to see that it's not just me. With all the recent praise spacemacs has been getting, I felt like maybe I was taking crazy-pills or something. It's a very aesthetically pleasing setup, and a fine editor on its own, I'm sure, but it feels a little disingenuous to me the way they aggressively market to Vim users. Like you, I've been using Vim for around 10 years, so any departure in behavior has the potential to seriously cramp my workflow.
(One of the big lures of spacemacs and/or evil-mode for me is that I've always been envious of Emacs Lisp. I see things like GNUS and org-mode and SLIME... then I see Vimscript, and I hang my head in shame.)
I use emacs+evil; tried out spacemacs but found it over-customized. I want to know what everything in my .emacs does, and if I don't like something, how to change it. Spacemacs was way too overwhelming for me.
Another long time vim user, I switched to emacs+evil then to spacemacs back to vim back to emacs+evil. Spacemacs was good but I started to feel bogged down, as I do with big ide's and went back to a very minimal vim.
I have now started back with emacs + evil and a minimal setup. I find it gives me the best of all worlds.
everyone talks about spacemacs=vim. this is nice, but what turned me off of spacemacs was the layers config abstractions. It breaks the normal configuration of emacs.
Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.
it honestly felt really backwards to use spacemacs after ~10y of vim usage. i would prefer to learn plain emacs + evil mode instead.