[jeremiep]

I switched from Emacs, had already read https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878 a few months prior which got me REALLY curious about Vim. I was using Emacs Prelude before and spent vast amounts of time customising my Emacs.

Then coworkers suggested spacemacs after I talked about an Emacs/Vim hybrid and tried it afterwards, oh boy :)

The main advantages of Spacemacs, IMO, are its community creating good quality layers, the concept of layers itself (think of it as a group for a major mode and its associated minor modes - makes config a lot cleaner), running almost everything through helm-mode (which isn't fun to integrate that well yourself), and its space leader key (hence spacemacs) on top of helm-mode giving you self-documenting navigation through every single command.

So saving files becomes "space f s" opening files is "space f f" and if you idle a few seconds at any point helm-mode shows you all the possible options, so its very easy to learn gradually.

I gotta admit I jumped headfirst into its tutorial and when I had completed it went on to read the full Spacemacs documentation, so most of the the learning curve was rather easy over a week or two, yet months later I'm still learning new things :)