Oh, yeah I use that mapping (caps to ctrl), but emacs would still always hurt my wrists! I prefer having visual/insert/normal modes and spacebar for modifiers in spacemacs. It’s the best of both worlds for me.

I went from a fully decked out vimrc to Spacemacs when I got tired of managing a .vim directory. I had things like Unite integrated everywhere and a generic repl experience via tmux so I had an inferior-mode for anything I wanted (sql, python, clojure, javascript, bash, ruby), even on remote machines (since it was just copy something from a register to a tmux pane, which could be ssh logged into a remote machine with a repl). I had autocompletion and doc lookups for the languages I cared about. Life was pretty good, but it was beginning to get tedious.

I decided to try Spacemacs hoping I might find their vim imitation to be 90% of what I was using in vim, such that I could take advantage of the excellent CIDER mode for Clojure development rather than hacking an analogue in vimscript + a user.clj file. I found Spacemacs to cover everything I had been doing in vim, almost universally better out of the box than I had before.

not OP, but yes.

most people that cite vi-vs-emacs diatribes these days have never actually even used "real" vi -

vim has just about all the "bloat" of emacs but without the real extensibility/programmability..

and just about any emacs session will likely be an order of magnitude smaller than any ide, while on the topic of bloat.

- someone who uses emacs and vi (but not vim)

ps: BSD is Unix