I try such distros every two years or so to see if it's gotten any better. Usually it's not worth my time from the start (fun thing is, I used to use Emacs for a year or so in uni, before turning to Vim and never looking back -- until I had to do Java, which meant Eclipse. I got back to Vim, but the last 5 years it's all ST with some sporadic attempts to like VSC).

Let's do this in realtime. I downloaded the latest Spacemacs.

1) Opening. Hmm, it's a zip not a DMG. Already losing me, but I'll stick, I'm not that shallow.

2) Hmm, it's just a bunch of source files? I guess the prominent "Download" link just gives you the configuration, not a bundled editor. I have to get Emacs from somewhere else. Grr... Lemme check their "Quickstart".

3) Yeah... the Quickstart link just gives you some BS that assumes you already know how to install this, and the "Install" button just gives a git command line to clone their repo. Back to square 1.

4) Fuck it, I'll use brew to install Emacs. Spacemacs doesn't even say which version of Emacs it works best with. I'll risk with what brew gives me.

5) Brew installation ends fine, with a caveat: "Please try the Cask for a better-supported Cocoa version". Now you tell me?

6) Anyway, I have an emacs, lemme git clone spacemacs now. OK, comes up, nice logo. Now, I have a huge emacs window -- so why is it asking me "first time" config questions in a tiny space at the bottom? And why doesn't it explain better what the various options (distro flavors) entail?

7) Let it do its install, then play around a bit. Close the window in evil mode (q!). I open emacs again, greeted with this:

  Found 1 new package(s) to install...
  --> refreshing package archive: gnu... [3/3]
  --> installing package: evil-unimpaired@spacemacs-evil... [1/1]
  An error occurred while installing evil-unimpaired (error: (wrong-type-
  argument package-desc nil))

Oh, and:

  Warnings:
    - Cannot find any of the specified fonts (Source Code Pro)! Font settings 
    may not be correct.      

8) I open some local source files to check. A buffer window appears on the right side with "warnings":

  Error (use-package): helm :config: Symbol’s value as 
  variable is void: helm-bookmark-map

Yeah, fuck that. Back to ST3.

To play devil's advocate here.

you clicked on download instead of install. now, to be fair, download shouldn't be on the main screen imo but still install is more in line with what you were looking to do so it should have been the thing you clicked on. Cloning the repo is installing it if you have emacs installed already.

It's open source so this can verbiage can be fixed. It's not a stand alone editor as it's a bunch of configurations to emacs.

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs has better onboarding docs than the homepage does.

At the end of the day it's a question of how much customization you want out of an editor. Reading the tone in your comment seems like you didn't want it to be successful at all anyway.

That's actually a pretty good barrier to entry. With emacs/spacemacs, if installing it is too frustrating for you, then configuring and using it is going to be way too frustrating for you.

Yes. And god forbid it plays out of the box end to end with configuration/elisp being totally optional.

My opinion is that emacs/spacemacs is more optimized for day to day work, than for the out of box experience. Personally, I'm fine with that, and there are some great editors (like sublime) that work out of the box if you prefer that.

However, the people generally working with/on emacs are not looking for that, they are looking for an editor optimized for customisation. They have already gone through the experience of setting it up, so why would they spend most of their time making it easier out of the box?

There is a cost to everything, and so far most people on emacs side have decided to spend their time on improving it's power, not it's ease of use.

For the most part it is completely optional to configure it and use elisp... it will ask you if you want to install a layer (group of packages) when you open up a filetype that it knows about and can handle. there is some configuration akin to setting up completion backend, linters, formatters etc that are applicable to your language/filetype of choice. The benefit of that is that the external tools are kept external where development of them can continue unimpeded by the development of the main text editor.

similarly, once you get to know the language quirks, it's a decent language that is basically a DSL for text editing. The power you get from being able to lookup how something was implemented by the text editor developers easily is extremely powerful.

If you like vim's idea of modal editing, emacs is 100% all about that. languages are major modes, minor modes are functions and keybindings that can be enabled and grouped together at will. transient buffers are used to send output to and are treated as normal buffers that you can do things to. The architecture and extensiblity of emacs is pretty amazing actually. Every key press is just a function and every key can be rebound based on current context using things like mode maps that get layered on top of everything and have precedence based on where you inserted the binding with sensible fallbacks when required.

Disclaimer: I love vim as a concept but hate viml and the plugins that were hampered by the lame programming language that was designed by bram.

if you have not tried magit and org mode you just don't really understand the power of emacs and the power of having everything be a function. spacemacs just makes setting up that powerful environment fairly painless but it's still a very old architecture with some warts.