Howto Configure Evil

Sat Dec 17 15:34:19 CET 2011

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 02:07:47PM -0500, Timothy Washington wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I'm trying to figure out how to get these configurations done with evil. I
> can't see how to do that with the documentation
> here<http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home>.

Yeah, the documentation is quite sparse, but writing a good one takes time ...

> I'm trying to get these basic behaviours:
> 
>    - directional delete:   d [up key]

dk should work, see the discussion of issue #46 at [1]

>    - line numbers
>    - setting softtabstop:   set sts=2

Evil is not a full emulation of Vim in Emacs (and will never be). This
means that especially (almost) everything that has to do with
configuration will *not* be emulated by Evil. The reason is that the
purpose of Evil is to combine the best of both world, Vim and Emacs.
And this means Evil does not shadow (besides keybindings) or replace
Emacs' own functions, configuration options, and so on.

>    - remap:   :   to   ;     (I want to avoid pressing shift to invoke a
>    vim command)
>    - remap:   %   to   [tab]      (I want to avoid pressing shift when
>    jumping between scopes)

All evil bindings are ordinary Emacs keymaps, so there is no "remap"
command. You should use Emacs function to change keybindings, e.g.,

(define-key evil-motion-state-map ";" 'evil-ex-read-command)

or 

(define-key evil-motion-state-map (kbd "TAB") "%")

should do what you want (untested, by I hope you got the idea. Have a
look at "evil-maps.el" for all default keybindings)

Frank

[1] https://bitbucket.org/lyro/evil/issue/46/d-d-behaves-different-from-dk-dj