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Comment by bpizzi | Hacker News Reader

I know this may sound quite weird, but I'm actually wondering what the benefits could be from consuming neovim api from emacs.

Maybe this could lead to something like having a better modal editor than what evil is already providing (and doing a great job at it), with emacs' benefits like orgmod and magit?

What are my fellow hners thinking on that?

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Neovim has sparked a dream in me, that every IDE in the future will have a "use vim" instead of "use vim commands", that will litterally use neovim, and give users the modal power and their preferred setup of vim combined with all the niceties of the given IDE for profiling, debugging code combined with the GUI features.

As a Spacemacs user for over a year (and a neovim user for a few years before that, and a vim user for a few years before that), I find that spacemacs does a good job of emulating vim keybindings, but it isn't exactly right. Having neovim handling the keybindings and communicating what actions need to be taken back to emacs would let me have the great flexibility of emacs' plugin system, while retaining the vim keybindings in as authentic a manner as possible.

Switched back to nvim from spacemacs because of this. Significant cognitive dissonance when something is familiar but not exact.

Have decided that just going full emacs would be a better route if the pain is going to be there anyways.

> having a better modal editor than what evil is already providing

FWIW, after using Evil for 1 year and generally liking it, it still fell a bit short for me since you are still in emacs and still need emacs keybindings some of the time, and some other modes will conflict with Evil, so it was a bit hard to maintain. I switched from Evil to God Mode which gives you modal editing in emacs but using emacs key bindings. I have found this to be a good compromise.

I believe the general idea to integrate an actual Vim implementation like nVim instead of an emacs plugin would enhance the vim experience inside emacs a lot.

But then you would give up Emacs's benefits if being able to reprogram everything. And you would lose the interaction with magit and org. After all, if you used nvim on Emacs, nvim would be doing the syntax highlighting and source code interaction, which defeats the point of running it in Emacs.

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