[throwaway427]

Yeah it's spacemacs. Any soup to nuts emacs distribution like this is going to be slow. I experience it all the time in doom. You don't have anything misconfigured.

Features like helm, ivy, projectile, etc cost. Linters and autocomplete can really make emacs jank. All this stuff is configured out the gate in these distributions.

[zeveb]

I've found that prelude, at least, isn't too bad, as long as it's not running on my phone.

I really like spacemacs (I'd love to get back to using vi keybindings in emacs), but man is it slow. Awfully cool, though.