I'm a full-time vim user (for over 20 years) that uses emacs for SLIME only.
viper-mode is terrible for me, as it's a "vi like" layer rather than a true vim emulation; it hits a sort of "uncanny valley" where My fingers try to use vim keystrokes and then fail horribly.
The good news is evil-mode actually is a vim emulation layer and I can switch back-and-forth between evil-mode and vim with very few issues. There are only 3 things that ever trip me up, and none of them are major:
1. Find and replace is different (but IMO much better) in evil-mode, since it preserves case when doing case-insensitive matching (:s/foo/bar will change "Foo" to "Bar"). Since emacs shows the substitution live, and I like this better, I haven't bothered to fix
2. C-a and C-x don't increment/decrement numbers in evil-mode like they do in vim. I mainly use this in macros, I suspect they may interfere with other keybindings, and sometimes it doesn't "do what I want" in vim
3. Yanking to the default register also yanks to the clipboard (+ register) and primary selection (* register). This behavior was changed after I adopted evil-mode, and I hate it when it matters, but it doesn't matter too often.
I'm sure there are obscure vim features that are corner cases similar to the above 3, but I still give evil-mode a firm "recommend" for vim users wanting to to lisp dev.
I'm not really an Emacs user, but I'm lisp-curious. I just assumed viper-mode was the best Vim plugin for Emacs. Now it looks like that's not the case.
As another commenter said: evil-mode is very good. Once I “got” emacs, I systematically translated my vim config and have never looked back. evil-mode still has a couple annoying differences, but it’s complete enough that they’re mostly things you wouldn’t notice unless you’re looking for them.
> There's a price to pay: currently the best-in-class experience is still Emacs and SLIME
Does viper-mode work well with this setup for vim users?