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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

An excuse to dive into lisp like that just might pull me away from Vim (Vimscript is terrible, sigh).

Have a Look at Evil, really good vim bindings for emacs

+1. Evil is great. I think it's made Emacs my favourite implementation of Vi yet.

Well, the problem is that these bindings don't usually implement the corner case Vim functionality I've come to rely on over the years. Can it record macros perfectly? Does :%s/foo/bar/ work? How about selecting, then :s/foo/bar/gi? Does the period key reproduce all actions properly? How about :%s/foo\([0-9]+\)/bar\1/ ? Do all of the basic actions do exactly the same thing as they do in a vim editor? Does % take you to the nearest parens or brackets, then cycle between the opening and closing one? If so, I'm sold. These aren't just random desires -- all of these are necessary for anyone who thinks in Vim.

A few years ago I tried some emacs vim simulator and it had glaring flaws in multiple categories. Vimpulse or Viper or something, I think.

It seems like it's a catch 22 because anyone sufficiently skilled with emacs to design a perfect vim simulator also has no reason to do so, since they're emacs masters.

(I'm on a phone else I'd check out evil now.)

It actually works similar enough that I switch between Vim and Evil daily without getting annoyed. I usually use Vim from the terminal. The follow things you asked about are all working:

  Macros
  Repeat
  :'<,'>s/foo/bar/gi
  :%s/foo\(bar\)/bar\1/

It is very actively developed and quite stable. There are of cause Vim features that are not implemented yet, but the core seams to be very well covered.

Interesting, maybe I'll give it a try. Do you feel any kind of impedance mismatch from using emacs w/o the native emacs bindings?

No, Emacs should be configured to your liking. The default Emacs keybindings (especially the more complex ones for common things) suck.

That said, you're still using Vim keybindings within Emacs and for some operations that Vim has no equivalent for you will need some Emacs knowledge. Also, some thing that Vim does have an equivalent for are easier to do in Emacs.

You cannot step into Emacs + evil-mode thinking you will never need to know anything else. You would be well advised to learn some Emacs basics and then help functionality.

For day-to-day operations like buffer editing you'll be able to use you Vim muscle memory.

recording macros works.

the :%s/foo/bar/ works

selecting then substituting works.

I've never encountered a situation where . didn't do what I expected.

The man commented about evil. I don't see how your experience with viper is relevant. Evil is damn good (as a long time vim user of 5+ years). I'd recommend you try it again. Plus, vim indentation behavior sucks compared to emacs. Give it a try, you might be surprised.

It's pretty damn close. I eventually gave up on emacs + evil and just went back to vim + fireplace for clojure, mostly because I didn't like having to set up my own bindings for all the plugins, even if basic editing worked well. Also, I can't find anything remotely as good as nerdtree, if someone knows of something, please let me know.

As others have said, Evil's emulation is really good. I've ran into the same problems you have mentioned in other Vim emulation layers so I had the same suspicious with Evil. Evil didn't disappoint. Very good so far.

This is basically the reason why I switched from Vim to Emacs.

The Python bindings are reasonable, much better than Vimscript.

I've been switching between Vim+python and Emacs+Evil for a bit.

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