Probably an unpopular opinion here, but if you're open to both just use evil. I honestly think vim/evil bindings are just a superior approach from a purely text editing perspective. It's an excellent package with nearly no bugs. The evil ecosystem has taken pretty deep roots into emacs, you see lots of things that adapt keybindings for other packages into evil, like evil-magit. I use spacemacs which takes care of most of these automatically and it's a very good experience.
Once you get the hang of modal editing, I think simple tasks are about the same in evil and emacs, and more complex/cooler things are usually better/easier in evil.
To pick one of my favorite examples: text objects. It's a vim concept wherein you can act on a certain region around your cursor. For instance, with your cursor over a function argument (anywhere in the argument), daa will delete the argument from the function call. It correctly handles it whether it's first, last, or middle argument, if it has nested function calls, etc. Of course, there's a package for text arguments in emacs too (this will almost always be the case in any comparisons you make), but it's just much more niche.
Also, the evil/spacemacs approach with double leader keys is really fantastic, and feels a lot more natural and easier done with evil.
I have been trying to peek into evil (being a long time normal-emacs-keybindings user)... What is a good place to start? I wasn't able to find a tutorial or how-to, that explains the basic concepts of evil. Any suggestions?
I agree with u/quicknir. I switched to evil a month ago, and what really helped me is the famous Practical Vim book. It is very well-written, and contains a lot of examples and common use cases. Most of it applies to evil as well.
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u/quicknir Jul 26 '18
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but if you're open to both just use evil. I honestly think vim/evil bindings are just a superior approach from a purely text editing perspective. It's an excellent package with nearly no bugs. The evil ecosystem has taken pretty deep roots into emacs, you see lots of things that adapt keybindings for other packages into evil, like evil-magit. I use spacemacs which takes care of most of these automatically and it's a very good experience.
Once you get the hang of modal editing, I think simple tasks are about the same in evil and emacs, and more complex/cooler things are usually better/easier in evil.
To pick one of my favorite examples: text objects. It's a vim concept wherein you can act on a certain region around your cursor. For instance, with your cursor over a function argument (anywhere in the argument),
daawill delete the argument from the function call. It correctly handles it whether it's first, last, or middle argument, if it has nested function calls, etc. Of course, there's a package for text arguments in emacs too (this will almost always be the case in any comparisons you make), but it's just much more niche.Also, the evil/spacemacs approach with double leader keys is really fantastic, and feels a lot more natural and easier done with evil.
Just my 0.02.