[nilkn]

I personally would find spacemacs very overwhelming if I didn't have prior experience with either vim or emacs. My recommendation is to pick one of the two, use it for a while and get some experience, and then consider spacemacs.

[leppr]

Just wanted to reiterate this. When I started with Spacemacs I had a few years of using and customizing Vim under my belt, yet I still found it very daunting at the beginning.

The main problem is customization. Even though Emacs Lisp and the Emacs ecosystem allows for a more organized and advanced setup, there are so many options to do any single thing.

Add to that the newbie-unfriendly documentation, you end up spending way too much time trying to understand how to customize things properly, or at all. Whereas with Vim, if I had a simple customization idea, I would just google it, find a solution in 2 minutes and slap a few more lines in my 1k LoC .vimrc.