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An interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both worlds, or so I like to think.



I tried that too for a bit over two weeks. In the end I had a comfortable configuration, but with noticably worse performance and a lot of inconsistencies. Whenever I use Emacs I kind of like the concept but at the same time feel like the good parts are buried beneath countless random additions that should have been optional plugins. I dare to claim that >95% of Emacs users do not use its integrated Tetris implementation, for example.


You might be right, though I do not have a good reference to compare Emacs + evil with. I think by default Emacs is a somewhat mediocre editor, the one thing that saves it is the unparalleled customizability, which should allow you to slowly prune the randomness and inconsistencies. But it is a commitment, not everybody wants a relationship with their editor. Btw, I regularly play Tetris in emacs ;-)


Definitely. But the thing is, coming from Vim with a custom configuration I'm at a point where I'd first need to reverse engineer parts of Emacs and reconfigure a ton just to get back to where I left Vim. And if I learned something when trying it out then it's the futility of trying to cram Vim into it expecting it to work without a Frankenstein's monster vibe. There's always something off or incomplete. I don't think I'll try it again soon, but if I do it would be with something like God mode; for one because Evil mode somehow breaks Emacs when run in the terminal, and also because Vim and Emacs just don't mesh together well imho. They are both excellent at doing very similar things, but their approaches are just not compatible.




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