Would you happen to know to what that is attributable?
Not sure but I suspect it’s 2 things:
- the default editor is kinda shit
- but it is really good at editing it’s configuration language: elisp
So people have a need to change their editor, and a good configuration language to do it in. Moreover, emacs secretly comes with a bunch of built-in features, not enabled by default. It also helps that emacs is not terminal-based, allowing users to do stuff in emacs that you aren’t able to do in a normal terminal (like viewing images, or searching for images on the web. Did I already say that emacs has a built-in (primitive) web browser?) and generally means that emacs users “live” in emacs, as they already have access to so many features.
If you compare this to vim
- good text editing experience by default
- vimscript wasn’t all that great (lua is better but neovim is still a very good editor so the drive to fix all it’s warts isn’t quite there)
- it is terminal based, so you can’t do some of the funny stuff that emacs allows you to do
Did I understand you correct in that customizing Spacemacs is a completely different beast?
Correct.
So knowledge acquired related to it doesn’t translate well to Vanilla/Doom Emacs and vice versa?
I wouldn’t quite say that. It is more that you are probably going to need some prerequisite emacs knowledge to make the best use out of spacemacs’ layer system. To figure out how spacemacs works, you first need to have a basic idea of how emacs works. Doom is a bit closer to the metal, so you need to know less in order to properly customize it
I think so? Tbh I’m not very involved in the modern version of neovim but I don’t disagree with them moving to lua
EWW (short for Emacs Web Wowser) is very basic, only really working with the HTML and not so much the css, and definitely not JavaScript. Don’t expect anything fancier than a blog post to work :P