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Comment by mattbriggs | Hacker News Reader

Can't read the article, but I use evil every day to do my work. I don't like vim so much as I like modal editing, and evil gets it right for about 98% of what I want. Emacs is (IMO) just a better platform, although going down the road of learning emacs, but none of its bindings is pretty rough, and probably a bit too much work for most people (m-x describe-key was my greatest friend when going through that process)

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C-h k is a shortcut for that function, while C-h f gets documentation on a function, while C-h a gives you fuzzy matching, which is wonderful when you're not sure what a command is called

I don't know why, I have zero issues remembering that cab deletes everything in your current set of parens and dumps you in insert mode, but emacs key chords just fly out of my head. If I am doing something like learning a new mode, I'll start using c-h k, but then a few months later when I need it again, it will be gone and I have to re learn it.

I'm currently using viper-mode (a vi mode that ships with Emacs). I haven't tried evil, and I'm interested why you choose it over viper-mode.

Vim is a fairly large beast, and I was using it at at least an intermediate level. Viper does the real basics of vim, but nothing more. Vimpulse was promising, but after a day using it, I switched back since there was so many things that I wanted to do but couldn't. With evil, the only thing that irritates me all the time is how it ignores punctuation.

function foo(){

If the cursory was at the end of the line and you did db in vim, you would get

function foo

In evil mode you get

function

Because it ignores the punctuation when deciding how much to delete.

That is the really big for me. More minor issues is the b text object doesn't work right in js2 mode, and there is no support for :g. Other then that, it completely covers everything I used in vim. Only I also get all the amazing modes, and don't ever have to use vim script again

Because viper-mode only covers vi features, not vim features. Once you start using text objects[1], its hard to go back to normal vi.

[1] Like, if your curser is anywhere inside a set of parens you can type 'yap' to copy the entire paren block or 'yip' to just copy the stuff inside the parens. And unlike 'f0y%' it always just does the right thing with nested parens.

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