As a counterpoint - I went back to VIM after a month of spacemacs. I've actually put in the effort to learn the keybindings for all the relevant tasks I needed and the way Emacs works internally, as much as it's possible in a month. I was doing Clojure and the main problem for me was the less fluent editing - most commands in vim are at least one keystroke shorter. The other big problem are non-evilified plugins that completely mess up the workflow - you constantly keep switching between "I'm in VIM" and "I'm in Emacs" mindset. Also, emacs feels a bit more sluggish, although that may be just CIDER.

The things I loved:

  * helm mode - autocompletions for the commands
  * consistency - SPC + ... everywhere
  * REPL in a buffer

I understand that a month with Emacs isn't remotely enough to make up for years of VIM, but I didn't find enough benefits to stick with it.