Evil has been fantastic. That said, I'm intrigued by Meow: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow
Meow inverts the order of commands: instead of vim's verb-count-object order, meow does object-count-verb, if I'm remember David Wilson's video right. This lets it pop up an avy-like overlay (I think it calls them "rulers") so you can see more clearly exactly how far of an extent an action is going to have. Kinda cool. Might try it some day.
Though frankly, any Vimmer using Emacs knows this already. Someone's either trolling, or never saw any reason to leave Vim and find out what these are options are really like, picking up the misunderstanding along the way.
I'd totally get that, these lists are awesome and maintaining them is hard work-- it's otherwise pretty great, and congratulations to everyone involved! I've always felt jealous of the folks funning neovim in their browser text-areas.
As an aside: I stick with emacs because of the modal and recursive minibuffer(s) (ie. command-line(s)). What vim setting do I change to be able to use normal mode down there?
> I stick with emacs because of the modal and recursive minibuffer(s) (ie. command-line(s)). What vim setting do I change to be able to use normal mode down there?
Not a setting. Just press Ctrl+F when your cursor is in the command line. After that, and until you finish entering the command, you will be able to use Esc to go into normal mode again.