- Encourages you to lock your personal configuration into the Spacemacs ecosystem, rather than writing it in generic Elisp so you can easily extract it (why I still use it).
- Introduces ridiculous abstractions that aren't necessary, just so they can put "spacemacs" in front of the variable name.
- Hasn't released to the master branch in 2 or 3 years (!)
- Consequenty breaks regularly when you use the rolling release (which you pretty much have to do)
- Has an unresponsive owner who doesn't want to hand the project off to someone else (or hasn't found someone)
- Sets up weird default behaviour that's very difficult to disable
- Has awful defaults for most languages anyway. Their Python layer is terrible, the features are extremely limited and it often doesn't work.
Hah, yeah. I used spacemacs for 2 years from summer 2018 until about two weeks ago. And you're right! It does incredible things for discoverability with the built in hydra integration.
I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.
Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.
Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.
It improves discoverability of hotkeys and packages for me.