Emacs vs Spacemacs: What are the differences?

What is Emacs? The extensible self-documenting text editor. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

What is Spacemacs? Emacs advanced Kit focused on Evil: The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs *and Vim!*. Since version 0.101.0 and later Spacemacs totally abolishes the frontiers between Vim and Emacs. The user can now choose his/her preferred editing style and enjoy all the Spacemacs features Even better, it is possible to dynamically switch between the two styles seamlessly which makes it possible for programmers with different styles to do seat pair programming using the same editor..

Emacs can be classified as a tool in the "Text Editor" category, while Spacemacs is grouped under "Tools for Text Editors".

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

• Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
• Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
• Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

On the other hand, Spacemacs provides the following key features:

• Batteries Included
• Nice UI
• Excellent ergonomics

"Vast array of extensions" is the top reason why over 57 developers like Emacs, while over 11 developers mention "Advanced support for Vim key bindings" as the leading cause for choosing Spacemacs.

Spacemacs is an open source tool with 18.1K GitHub stars and 4.45K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Spacemacs's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Emacs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 99 company stacks & 73 developers stacks; compared to Spacemacs, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.