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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

As a long-term Emacs user, I started really enjoying typing with Vim bindings (evil mode).

It feels to me that Vim is great at the low-level process of editing text. Everything else is fine - as good as any power editor, but not inherently great. This is the complement of Emacs, which to me is exactly the other way around.

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For me, a killer feature of evil-mode is the "hybrid" state (`evil-disable-insert-state-bindings`) that allows to use emacs (aka readline) keybindings in insert mode.

When I have only a minor edit to make in the middle of typing something (like transposing two characters) it saves me the back-and-forth with the normal mode and it's really sweet.

It probably makes me an heretical freak, but I'm definitely hooked. I guess I am condemned to live the rest of my life in emacs now.

Same, I use a mix of Emacs and Vi bindings. Now I can only function in Emacs.

But I write R/python/markdown, so it works out fine for me.

I've tried evil mode a couple times over the years, but slight behavioral differences threw me off my game. I don't remember exactly (it was years ago on the last attempt), but it was something small like the cursor position being slightly different after some operation like shifting a line.

My "problem" is that since I've been using the same editor for 30 years, I don't tend to think too much about the manipulation of text. So even the tiniest of behavior changes is unsettling to me.

Though I could probably adapt.

I should try it all again (maybe not emacs, but something), and really set up everything well for auto-complete and such (mainly C and Rust). My current vim setup (using pathogen) is sort of a mess.

for me, the basic keybindings are what matter. I use a full fledged ide, but still have vim bindings. When you become comfortable enough, editing becomes quicker and more in line with my train of thought. Thought->action->code change becomes very quick

I want to switch to using Spacemacs and use Evil but on Windows 10 I'm having no luck getting that working due to some weird errors when emacs starts and tries to install the packages. So for the time being I'm stuck using vim.

Spacemacs is overly complicated. Try Doom, or just start with vanilla Emacs, and add Evil.

Thanks. I will try that.

And if you're going to use WSL, check out:

https://medium.com/@elecming/the-ultimate-emacs-hacking-tuto...

I confirm that, switched from an overly complex config to spacemacs then a year later to doom. Doom feels much more polished, faster and require a lot less configuration, at least for my use case.

Sounds like the errors I got installing spacemacs. I think... I forced it to work by changing the access permissions on a folder that spacemacs itself had created.

Portacle worked really well for me on Windows 10, while learning Common Lisp. It's a nice base of settings that can be esiliy expanded upon. Vanilla Emacs was a nightmare. Once I got comfortable with Portacle, I swapped out the emacs folder with the a v28 build for much better performance. Much better than Space/Doom Emacs (on Windows).

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