Trying Spacemacs
In a virtual machine, to avoid compromising my existing main setup
The installation process seems to be smooth.
It asked a couple of questions: one mysterious about the environment I would prefer, and another one about the initial settings (minimal or not) I'd rather use.
Initial setup finished with no errors
Which is good. The only problem –if one wants to be picky– is that the status line looks messy, probably due to a lack of proper fonts.
I try to venture in the scratch buffer
I have, somehow, Vim keybindings and Emacs' ones. So for example I can edit some Elisp expression using "Vim" then evaluate it with C-x C-e. I think there are people that were burned like witches for much less.
I'm surprised
I had the uneducated conviction that with evilmode (on which Spacemacs is based, if I understood correctly) one could either use Vim bindings or Emacs' ones, choosing on a buffer basis. And that seemed unconvenient and unpractical to me. I should dig deeper, but this mixture seems well conceived and sound. As I wrote in another place, quoting Nic Ferrier, Vim is a superior editor, but Emacs is a superior environment to write editors. And Spacemacs is a proof.