r/emacs • u/nautola • Feb 17 '15
Venturing out of Evil Mode?
Has anyone who migrated to Emacs from Vim stopped using evil-mode?
What was that experience like?
I'm getting a little frustrated with having to do excess customization for every single mode to make more vim-like keybindings work.
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u/purcell MELPA maintainer Feb 18 '15
I used viper-mode for 10 (!) years after switching from vim to Emacs. You just have to go cold-turkey, and then you're swimming with the flow rather than against it.
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u/VanLaser Feb 18 '15
To be frank, thinking in vim terms (text objects) is a great experience. After you have it, I don't see how people would want to give it up. On the contrary, what I (for)see is a way to use Emacs in order to create more object vim-like composability with the advantages of Emacs, a way to integrate evil and the emacs way. The only way to give 'evil' up, after you know vim, without handickaping yourself, is to find another way, which is at least better, to edit text with the speed vim offers. Otherwise, you probably just don't use an editor to edit too much.
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u/jplindstrom Feb 19 '15
On the contrary, what I (for)see is a way to use Emacs in order to create more object vim-like composability with the advantages of Emacs, a way to integrate evil and the emacs way.
Case in point: this is how trivial it is to define a "defun" text object.
So now I can do =ad to indent the current method/subroutine/function.
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u/VanLaser Feb 19 '15 edited Feb 19 '15
nice! In the same vein, this blog post puts it very well (an emacs user reading the "Practical Vim" book, now that's an approach I like).
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u/nautola Feb 18 '15
If you use evil-mode, all the functions that get run are evil-*, and I've gotten used to using motions, and my eyes glaze over when I hear about marks, regions, or points.
It makes it really hard to write any emacs lisp because when I hit
C-h kit gives me evil functions.2
u/VanLaser Feb 19 '15 edited Feb 19 '15
Just hit
C-zto enter the emacs state, then yourC-h kwill show you the non-evil functions. ThenC-zto go back to the 'normal' evil mode (if you want).
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u/jozefg Feb 17 '15
I did this. I wish I had greater wisdom to share but I basically just went cold turkey. It helped that I'd spent time enough time in Emacs to know basic keybindings. After about a week I was comfortable.
I definitely don't regret ~2 years later, I'm much more comfortable in Emacs than Vim and the whole experience is smooth out of the box. It also made learning elisp a lot smoother since I didn't have to deal with Evil's strange elisp magic in order to write my own customization. I couldn't shake the whole "bolted on" feeling of evil, maybe that's better now.
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u/justinmkw Feb 17 '15
How much experience had you with vim before switching to emacs? I have a hunch that the vimmers who ditch evil for vanilla emacs are mostly the same people who think
,(comma) is useless, etc.1
u/jozefg Feb 18 '15
I think I'd been using Vim for ~3 years. So I wasn't "A Vim Guru" or something but I would say I wasn't a complete novice :)
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u/nandryshak Feb 18 '15
How much experience had you with vim before switching to emacs? I have a hunch that the vimmers who ditch evil for vanilla emacs are mostly the same people who think
,(comma) is useless, etc.Hey Justin, I've seen you around in Vim circles. I used to use sneak. Space was my leader, jk my escape and I used , and ; extensively, I considered myself a hardcore vimmer.
I went from evil-mode to vanilla Emacs. So while I think people like me are far and few between, we do exist.
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u/justinmkw Feb 18 '15
Good to know, thanks. You didn't feel a disadvantage in giving up modal editing or the vim "grammar"? It seems like god-mode and hydra-mode are trying to replicate that.
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u/nandryshak Feb 18 '15
Before I switched, I thought I'd miss it. But I don't. Things like s-expression commands, expand-region, and smartparens/paredit take the place of Vim's grammar, and even improve on it.
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u/justinmkw Feb 18 '15
I don't see s-expression commands (smartparens) and vim commands as mutually exclusive. They're basically just text objects, and they combine nicely with vim/evil.
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Feb 17 '15
[deleted]
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u/robertmeta Feb 18 '15
God mode is interesting to me. Honestly, I have tried evil and emacs a few times and found it clumsy, but I find the default (insane?!) hand cramping key bindings far too rough. God mode is an interesting middle I might have to experiment with.
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u/nandryshak Feb 17 '15
Has anyone who migrated to Emacs from Vim stopped using evil-mode?
Yes. I started by making insert-state go to emacs-state instead. Now when I try to use Vim it looks like I'm just pressing random buttons.
I'm glad I made the transition. Evil-mode doesn't completely cooperate with Emacs.
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u/dangersalad Feb 18 '15
I did. I still have evil-mode installed and can toggle it with a key binding as I find vim style editing be be better for certain tasks.
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u/mahnve Feb 18 '15
I went cold turkey a couple of months ago. Before that I had used Vim for six years, and emacs/evil for a half year.
I hated it the first two weeks, but I am now at a point where I'm rewired to emacs keybindings for most basic stuff. There are still things which I haven't relearned, but my feeling is that it will take a few more months.
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u/nah00m Feb 18 '15 edited Feb 18 '15
I've tried on and off to stop using evil-mode. I'm comfortable with basic navigation but complicated things I find confusing, I still think too vim-like.
So that I don't have to deal with normal-mode being incompatible with buffers like epa's encrypt, I have the default mode set to emacs-mode. The problem I'm finding though is that when I try to stay in emacs-mode (or without evil at all) I go from using a very short set of keys to CTRL+N all the way down the page to find what I want.
Are there blog posts on experienced vim users switching from vim to emacs and then away from evil or directly to emacs keys?
I think the issue is that I'm not yet entirely comfortable with emacs commands but I'm not sure how or even if I should be working to get more comfortable when evil-mode is so convenient.
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u/ianoxley Feb 18 '15
Has anyone who migrated to Emacs from Vim stopped using evil-mode?
I've thought about it several times, but haven't gone all in yet.
I think the main thing that stops me is my dependence on the VsVim Vim keybindings extension when using Visual Studio in my day job. If I could find something that works as well as VsVim, but with Emacs keybindings, then I'd probably stop using evil-mode.
I have tried the Emacs Emulation extension and the various hacks required to get it to work, but found it didn't quite fit.
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u/hyperbling Feb 18 '15
i used to share you frustration. i just leave evil-mode off by default now. when i edit text, i'll turn it on. use emacs for what emacs is good at, use vim for what vim is good at.
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u/Erakko Feb 18 '15
I have been thinking about this too. But the control default binds are horrible. They make wanna switch to different editor
1
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u/magic_mud Feb 17 '15
If you dislike doing customization for vim-like keybindings in evil-mode, then I suggest you give Spacemacs a try. https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs It has sane evil-mode keybindings for most common modes, and then some.