[weaksauce]

you definitely can use evil mode but you will find a lot of edge cases where you have to configure something in some modes to behave sanely whereas with spacemacs they have usually done all that legwork of anything you want to use.

[michaelmrose]

You can get a lot of help with evil-collection

https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection

Which provides evil bindings for a lot of modes

[kalium_xyz]

You also have doom which is just evil and not space centric AFAIK

[weaksauce]

i'm a large fan of space as a leader key even coming from vim so spacemacs felt like a natural extension. but yeah doom works for many people

[smitty1e]

Doom has good reviews AFAICT

[shanavasm]

I switched to doom from spacemacs and quite happy with it. Lot more easier to tweak that spacemacs.