I assume this is due to the amount of effort that would have been required for it to acquire some of the functionality you were expecting out of it. Am I right?
I didn’t really understand what Emacs was at the time, I just got fed up with trying to make vim into an IDE. Out of the box, spacemacs had good language support, modal editing, and looked ‘modern’.
What I love about Emacs now is Lisp and the package ecosystem. I have 396 packages installed, and many of them interact in quite complex ways. When I do a package upgrade it pretty much pulls the latest from the development branch of each package. Some packages haven’t been changed in 10 years, some are changed daily. It’s bleeding edge everything, and things don’t actually break that much. Lisp makes for (obviously IMO) beautiful, simple code, so most packages are a pleasure to fix, extend, or automate.
I intend to put my teeth in GNU Guix at some point in the future.
Me too, but I nix has served me well, so I haven’t been motivated.