[Xephyrous]

I've been using spacemacs off and on for a few months, (although never as my primary editor). I really like their out-of-the-box config, and it's much easier and better than my previous copypasted amalgamation of an init.el file. I have a few qualms with it though.

- It completely takes over emacs. Your modifications now go in ~/.spacemacs. Don't touch ~/.emacs.d/ Want to install something from melpa? Make a spacemacs configuration layer. That aspect feels like a strong step away from the emacs ethos where you're on the same footing as the editor authors. I don't like the inversion of control.

- It's unstable. Fairly often I'll update and something will fail, leaving me helplessly with emacs keybindings. Thankfully, a revert is easy.

- The last one is a problem with evil in general, you'll still occasionally find yourself in emacs mode, where hjlk and more importantly ":q" don't work

[tuhdo]

Well it's still in Beta though but I must say it's still excellent. This is from an Emacs user, currently using holy-mode (basically another way of saying Emacs mode in Spacemacs terminology and it's actually a mode configured for Emacs users).