Why do I need to restart emacs to reload configuation in spacemacs?

Question

Anytime I modify the spacemacs dotfile, I need to restart emacs in order for my modification to take effect. I have tried spc+f+e+R, but this does not work. Am I misunderstanding what spc+f+e+R (Reload configuration) does, or if not, has anybody else encountered this problem?

Sorry, I am new to emacs/spacemacs.

Edit: spc+f+e+R in my configuration corresponds to "Reload configuration". When I say that it does not work, I mean that whatever I changed does not take effect until I restart emacs. As an example, I tested remapping my 9 key to (. When I reload the configuration (without restarting emacs), the keys are not remapped. However, when I restart emacs, the keys are now remapped.

Answer 1

There are lots of ways to re-evaluate elisp without restarting Emacs.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/evaluating-elisp-emacs is a nice article to read on the subject.

eval-last-sexp, eval-region, eval-defun, and eval-buffer are go-tos, and you can always load-file.

What will that do? Who knows? Your config is a software program written in the Emacs Lisp programming language, so re-evaluating your config in part or in whole is executing a program that you can see and we can't, so we can't tell you what the outcome will be.

Most elisp files are (expected to be) written such that loading them twice is no different to loading them once, but whether or not that is true depends entirely on the author of the code.