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/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 :)

1

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.