Evil Mode: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs

TL;DR: Watch this video: the stated reasons for switching are very similar to my own. It wasn't until I watched this video and read the book that I took the plunge to switch to emacs. It was the fact that with emacs I could have vim _plus_ much more and better functionality. ▶ this video I'll have to write a blog post about it sometime, but basically while I absolutely _love_ the vim 'editing interface', that is, not the GUI, but the modal editing, the bindings, motions, objects, relative line numbers, and so on, everything else aside from that, primarily plugins, always felt like ad-hoc hacks to me. I've contributed to a couple of vim plugins so I've seen it first hand, to the point where plugin authors I've worked with have expressed feelings of wanting to switch to emacs to just make things easier. Indeed, some have, such as the vim-airline author [ link ]. Whereas plugins in vim oftentimes gave me the impression that they were stopgaps and hacky workarounds to get vim to do something it wasn't meant to do, emacs packages feel very natural, comprehensive, and well designed. Just take this article for example. As awesome as vim-fugitive is for vim, I feel that it's good _for being a vim plugin_, but it has _nothing_ on the equivalent on emacs: magit. Take a look at it's comprehensive documentation: link Or flycheck's [ link ] documentation here [ link ] It seems like everyone puts up with everything else about vim just to have the good parts of vim that are generally ver

"Evil Mode: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs" by Aaron Bieber is an interesting talk on switching from vim to emacs + org-mode. ▶ this video

Emacs has recently been seeing a lot of growth from vim users who are migrating to emacs "distros" (like spacemacs and doom) that are pre-configured with emacs' vim-emulation. I found this video[0] a pretty interesting perspective from a die-hard vim user who switched. [0]: ▶ this video

It sounds counter-intuitive to use another editor, especially Emacs, but this might actually be the best advice. Emacs is on top of the game for proportional text editing, as well as the ability to make it behave very much (even exactly so) like Vim. I'd recommend watching this talk for why: ▶ this video

I don't know NixOS, but this blog post and lecture might help you give emacs a fair trial: link ▶ this video One of my vim-using coworkers found it. He, along with another colleague, have since found emacs compelling enough to use as their main text editor.

You might find this article useful: link Aaron gave a great talk about his switch here: ▶ this video , which caused several people at work to move off NeoVim and give emacs a go.

I, as a Vim user myself, recently saw this and decided to give emacs a try. I still have a long way to go but I have to say that it really does look like it might be the best of both worlds. ▶ this video

I have a serious question: If Emacs has a lot of the features people seek in Neovim, why not just use Emacs in evil mode? I watched this earlier today so it seemed relevant: ▶ this video Side note: I've been using Neovim for months now and I've not tried Emacs. Not because I don't want to but because Vim with the plugins i have works really really well.