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

thoughtbot · 563.1K views · 2015-06-03 · 40:02

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Overview

Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it to Vim users considering Emacs, and several say it persuaded them or their coworkers to switch.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2015–2020

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What people said

blaenk · 2015-07 · Strong recommendation

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. [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

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swalladge · 2020-05 · Recommendation

"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. [VIDEO]

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spudlyo · 2019-11 · Recommendation

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]: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by thoughtbot, played through YouTube.

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