Bling

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc

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 [ http://bling.github.io/blog/2013/10/27/emacs-as-my-leader-vim-survival-guide/ ].

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: http://magit.vc/ Or flycheck's [ http://www.flycheck.org/ ]…

I haven't dived into the details of Evil mode too much. The basic Vim motions and commands work out of the box, so for a casual vim user, it ought to be enough. I also went ahead and installed Evil-leader, so I could have the same <leader> keymaps that I have in my vim config.

A few places where I looked for small things here and there:

1. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

2. https://github.com/cofi/evil-leader

3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8483182/evil-mode-best-practice

4. https://github.com/mixandgo/emacs.d/blob/master/my-evil.el

5. https://bling.github.io/blog/2013/10/27/emacs-as-my-leader-vim-survival-guide/

And I also got ido-vertical-mode so the emacs command buffer looks better.

Here's my setup: https://github.com/mgill25/emacs See user.el

Cheers!

PS: Some of the configuration needs to be set up before you activate certain modes - which is often implicit in plugins, so watch out for that. Eg: To emulate C-u behavior, the functions had to be put ahead of the (require 'evil) call in evil-leader.el

Here's my migration guide from early September, if you're looking for more resources:

http://nathantypanski.com/blog/2014-08-03-a-vim-like-emacs-config.html

Bling, who I've linked to in that post, has repeatedly made quality posts about making the transition:

http://bling.github.io/