I'm not really crazy about Spacemacs because there's so much happening and I like to slowly build my config over time so I know what each piece does, so I can quickly make changes if there's something causing friction.

A nice happy medium is Prelude -- https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

It's big, but probably not too big to understand and jump in and tweak.

I still prefer my own hand-rolled config though.

I have used Spacemacs for a while (ex vi/vim user). It is a good gateway drug, but it is also buggy and slow.

After a few months, I started to build up my configuration bit by bit with use-package, evil, and general.el. I largely use the same keybindings as Spacemacs, but it's much leaner and faster.

Had the same experience, spacemacs has nice defaults and it's gorgeous, but the lag bothered me so much that I was using vim a lot of time to get things to work.

Changed to a clean configuration and built it slowly, everytime I hit an annoyance I fixed and learned something new, now it works better than spacemacs for my workflow and still is way snappier.

Or just install Evil in plain Emacs.

I installed spacemacs a couple of weeks ago. I’m enjoying it but I have to keep switching back to sublime to get things done quickly then switching back when I can afford to take time doing things.

same here. I'm totally fluid in org, but navigating files, a simple search and replace, finding the spell check suggestions: all still hard

Basically just start flyspell mode in the modes you prefer including only for comments with flyspell-prog-mode and configure as desired.

    (use-package flyspell
        :config
        (setq ispell-program-name "/usr/sbin/aspell")
        (setq flyspell-consider-dash-as-word-delimiter-flag t)
        (define-key flyspell-mode-map (kbd "C-:") 'flyspell-correct-wrapper)
    )
    (use-package flyspell-correct)
    (use-package flyspell-correct-ivy)

you may want a binding to add the word at point to your dictionary I swiped this function for somewhere

    (defun my-save-word ()
    (interactive)
    (let ((current-location (point))
            (word (flyspell-get-word)))
        (when (consp word)    
        (flyspell-do-correct 'save nil (car word) current-location (cadr word) (caddr word) current-location))))