No, Evil mode is not better than Vim itself. For one it's slower, defining keybindings is much more verbose, everything outside the actual text file has completely different controls, and I lose most of the seamless interoperability with other terminal tools. And it runs within an environment that tries to be literally every text-related tool by itself, making it overly complicated in many aspects.
Emacs provides a convincing Vim layer on top of a hackable LISP runtime. While there's not much point in trying to decide which one is "better," it's not an entirely unfounded point.
> For one it's slower
Could you be more specific? At least for me, there's no noticeable lag when using Evil mode.
> defining keybindings is much more verbose
This is why some use Vim? I don't see how this:
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "w") 'some-function)
nnoremap w :<C-u>call some-function()<CR>
> everything outside the actual text file has completely different controls
It's because Emacs is more of a runtime for elisp applications. As such, it makes sense to have different behaviors for each key depending on context. FWIW evil-collection does a pretty good job of making keybindings feel consistent outside of ordinary text buffers, so you won't have to fall back to Emacs keybindings these days.
> I lose most of the seamless interoperability with other terminal tools
This is plainly false. Shell interoperability in evil works exactly the same as in Vim.
> overly complicated in many aspects
This doesn't mean much without specifics. Implementation complexity isn't inherently a bad thing as long as it provides value.
Besides, Emacs is a just a LISP interpreter at its core. If anything, it's easy for programmers to grasp and hack on.
Long-time Vim user here. I tried switching to Doom Emacs for a few months. I really, really wanted to like it. As a nerd, the infinite customizability is like catnip to me. It has a really mature plugin ecosystem and you can have a really comfy computing setup with magit, org mode, dired, mu4e, etc...
But Emacs is intrinsically slow as molasses. The nail in the coffin for me was the scrolling performance. And I don't mean line-by-line. Even going half a page, or a full page at a time, pegs a CPU core and there is noticeable latency. The Doom Emacs documentation straight up admits it [0]. They recommend crazy things like turning off line numbers. Even with newfangled native Elisp compiler, it doesn't come even close to vim on alacritty.
[0] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/faq...
Just to play devils advocate (in reality I'm a die-hard-never-use-anything-else vim user, and have been since 1996-ish), I did once manage to set up vim with so many highlighting and display options that I made my i7 crawl whenever I tried to scroll.
(The main thing that pegged the core to 100% was ':set cul' with ':set number' and various different syntax highlighting for numbers, highlighted numbers, highlighted line, syntax-highlighting within a highlighted-line, etc).
So, yeah, vim can be slow too if you nerdgasm all over the config :-)
1. you spam the scroll key
2. you're viewing a exceptionally large buffer
3. syntax highlighting happens to perform badly on the buffer
4. some plugin is blocking the editor
For Vim, the forth situation has vastly improved with async APIs pioneered by Neovim, but it still can happen nonetheless.
As for the advice about turning off line numbers, that's just a micro-optimization. I've seen similar advice with Vim too. set nonumber nocursorline etc etc... I don't follow any of those overzealous optimization advice either on Vim or Emacs, and scrolling performance is just fine most of the time. Though for Vim, "set lazyredraw" did make a big difference in terms of scrolling performance, but that piece of advice isn't the sort that hampers usability so I don't think it really counts as an overzealous micro-optimization.
But back to Emacs, my view is that general editing performance is just fine. When you think about it, if general editing performance were noticeably horrid, that would be a deal breaker for pretty much everyone. It's mostly blocking operations that's causing problems, but that's a slightly different situation from Emacs being sluggish in general. Vim used to have this problem too up until a few years ago, but it ceased to be a major source of pain after plugins adopted async APIs. I just wish Emacs would follow suite.
There are zero excuses for a widely used editor program to lag that badly in 2021, on very strong hardware nonetheless.
One "hack" I found is to have your font not contain emojis. That was literally the only thing that actually helped.
And Emacs itself isn't at fault that LSP does its thing in a synchronous manner in the same main UI thread and makes Emacs super slow. I know that. But I also know that NeoVIM does the same thing asynchronously and doesn't stutter.
Sadly I'll be done with Emacs soon. I like it quite a lot but I'm not seeing any will to make it adequately fast or, at the very least, make it so its main UI thread can't be blocked.
This sends a message to me that the maintainers are using Emacs in a specific way and don't care about how others are using it. Which means that it's time to part ways.
Not sure what you mean by this
> lose most of the seamless interoperability with other terminal tools
It's not like VIM is more or less interoperable than Emacs is with other shell tools. They live in their own space, you don't (often) pipe stuff in or out of it.
Though there's not much to read into my comment, it was an attempt of being witty, but evil mode is the best VIM implementation found in any editor and just for the fact that Elisp >> Vimscript, makes evil mode a better environment than VIM itself.
Well that's not true at least for vim.
: read !FOO
will run the FOO command and read the results back into the current buffer. I usually search my codebase by reading the results of a grep into a temporary buffer and 'gf'ing to the appropriate file
Recent versions of evil have the option of choosing undo backend, and I have found the new buildin one impeccable thus far.
I used to do that too, I now use the Ack plugin which is almost instantaneous on a codebase that grep used to take 2s-3s long to search. The speed isn't what matters though, it's the fact that Ack only searches source code, not all files so my results is less polluted with irrelevant matches.
...huh? I pipe things into vim absolutely all the time.
I don’t mean to be rude but this is exactly the sort of thing OP meant by “people recommending evil don’t understand why people like vi(m)”.
whatever_command | vim -
Yes you can pipe stuff in and out, you can do in Emacs as well.
My point being that VIM isn't better than Emacs on this aspect, and they're not like other shell tools where COMMON usage is by piping stuff in and out; they're not like cat, more, wc. They live in their own space.