[Synroc]

did you have experience beforehand in using emacs? I've been using spacemacs for a couple of weeks, but I'm having trouble getting past the most basic usage, and partially it's because I feel like I don't have much experience with emacs.

[no_wizard]

I did not in any real sense. I did the tutorial and chose the sane defaults recommended (so called Evil Mode) which gives you some great controls and a nice tutorial you can walk through if you type :tutor at the main screen.

I admit I have never used Vim or Emacs but the tutorial was enough to do movement and I also read this wonderful documentation as well: First this here which gives a wonderful overview of the whole philosophy behind SpaceMacs:

http://spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION

Then I took a look at this just to get some better idea of how to do certain things with the layers since it's very dependent on a layering system:

http://spacemacs.org/doc/LAYERS.html

And for good measure since Evil mode emulates Vim I thought it might be nice to see what this had to say:

http://spacemacs.org/doc/VIMUSERS.html

It took me like a week to be efficient but now I'm flying so much faster than I was with VS Code or Atom. I still use Sublimr Text for some things because I like it but this is a great editor and has a lot of potential and is extremely extensible with Emacs lisp and I believe they already have a way to bridge in Vim plugins too