On the flip side, as someone who's tried to change stacks or IDEs or other software a few times, there's something to be said for already having momentum using existing solutions. Sometimes alternatives can be a little better, but not better enough to justify the time/energy/etc costs of switching. And more often than not, alternative solutions have their own flaws too. I tried three times in the past week to switch my portfolio website (https://sdegutis.com) to using Jekyll or Metalsmith or Hexo, and each time it just didn't prove any better than my own hand-rolled Node.js site generator, and in most cases, it was definitely worse in some ways, at least for the specific requirements I had. So switching tools can be good, if it's legitimately better in some way, and not worse in any other ways. But that doesn't isn't the case as often as we'd like to hope.

Currently running into this moving from Vim to Spacemacs. Even with vim bindings, it works just slightly differently enough that there's a good chunk of friction. Specifically, mashing escape no longer reliably gets you into normal mode, bash is in a separate window instead of in tmux, some of my settings are different in ways I don't want to spend the time analyzing (probably scrolling? IIRC I set things up to center themselves as best they can in the window in vim), and the tab-completion for opening a file with :e is different through trying to be way more "helpful".

Assuming Spacemacs is like regular emacs, Ctrl-g [(keyboard-quit)] is the moral equivalent to esc in vim. Mash away.

If you want esc to work that way, put in your .emacs (but I really discourage it):

  (define-key key-translation-map (kbd "ESC") (kbd "C-g"))