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Comment by jackcviers3 | Hacker News Reader

Use helm-M-x and which-key, and avoid anything but use-package and customize. You don't have to eat the muscle-memory elephant all at once.

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Or just install spacemacs and get a lot of that set up for you for free, plus a bunch of other cool stuff.

Spacemacs hinders your growth with Emacs over the long run. It hides Emacs internals from you and jumps through a lot of hoops to make Emacs feel modern. But the beauty is skin-deep and the second you start wanting something off-script, you'll find it getting in your way, with online threads and such catering towards vanilla rather than frameworks.

I disagree 100%. There is literally nothing you can do within init.el that you can't do within `.spacemacs`, and you will rarely have to venture outside of `dotspacemacs/user-config ()` except to add layers or packages to the appropriate config variables so they can be installed automatically for you.

I've been using emacs for over 10 years and had zero issues with making the transition. On the contrary, it's simplified my emacs life quite a bit. The only thing I have not been able to get working is `eaf`, but that's clearly not the fault of spacemacs.

Of course there isn't. It's all elisp under the hood. Realize though that you started with vanilla and moved to Spacemacs. Most people are going to do it the other way around. Start with Spacemacs and you're guaranteeing yourself a rough time, because you won't have the understanding of vanilla you need in order to customize it. I wound up dumping both Spacemacs and Doom once I finished reading Mastering Emacs. I may move back in the future but for now I'm much happier with a simpler system.

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