Why I stopped using viper, and am going to stop using Evil

[Michael Markert]

Christoph LANGE <langec at web.de> writes:

> 2012-02-29 20:36 Matt Armstrong:
>> In short: it is easier to use one editor at a time.
>
> In contrast to your experience, I appreciate to be able to use two 
> editors at a time, and only Evil gives me the opportunity to do so.

Well it's quite a mental burden and they don't mix that easily.

a) Using Emacs makes it really easy to stay in insert-state a lot of time.
b) Vim's undo model works with "iterations" of insert- and normal-state
   changes

Take them together and you know what bites me more often than I like.

Well Evil offers to change the undo granularity, but I really like
the Vim model because it breaks changes down in a semantically related way.

I also appreciate the power of Emacs and Vim at my fingertips but it's
not exactly _easy_.

>> By default, Evil presents you vim key bindings, but makes you use Emacs key
>> bindings too:
>>
>>   (a) see the huge list of modes in evil-emacs-state-modes
>
> This is a separate problem I'd say, but agree with your concerns about 
> this and would also appreciate an Evil solution for it.  There used to 
> be viper-in-more-modes, which gave vi-style keybindings to a number of 
> typical Emacs modes.  Indeed I would prefer vi-style keybindings to be 
> introduced for all modes currently in evil-emacs-state-modes, but it 
> will take time to get them implemented.

As I've pushed quite some into that list, that's my feeling as
well. Many of those modes are some kind of `menu modes': You move your
cursor more easily as in vanilla Emacs (like n & p instead of C-n & C-p)
and do something with the entry at point, archive-mode is a perfect
example of this. (I'm pretty sure there are more mode patterns to find)

Dired _was_ a perfect example of this: It's evilized now.

If we can come up with a way to programmatically evilize a mode-map a
lot of the modes in there will vanish.

The greatest obstacle is where to put conflicting keys maybe in an own
keymap ... but where to bind that keymap?

Any ideas here?

If you want a hard nut to play with: Try magit. They have lots of
(useful) single letter keys, many conflicting with basic vim movement
keys. Most dreadful one being `k' I don't count anymore how often I was
asked (luckily!) if I wanted to kill that chunk/item ...

@ Matt
Well I don't think it's evil's goal to reimplement Vim faithfully
because it'd much more work than just to merge the two (or copy the best
things) with little gain.

I'm also not sure what do you hope to gain with an Emacs that behaves exactly
like Vim but is not Vim.

Am I reading you wrong here? Could you elaborate?

Anyway thanks for your input but sadly I don't think that this can be
solved (or at least only in the long run).

Michael
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