Hi Matt, my 2 cents, well, maybe 10 cents, on your mail.
In short: Thanks for sharing your experience! Mine is quite different though. 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. I frequently use any Emacs keybindings that have not been overloaded with vim keybindings by Evil. Not just the C-x and C-c prefixes, but also a lot of M-something. Sometimes Emacs is just more convenient than vi. Take for example M-c (capitalize-word). This key has no meaning in vim (AFAIK), and it works both in Evil's normal mode and in insert mode. I don't care about the theoretical possiblity to introduce reasonable keybindings in vim as well – I wouldn't want to make the effort. > 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. > (b) insert mode has Emacs key bindings My feeling about vi's insert mode is that it wastes a lot of potential. > On (b), Evil gives me M-q, C-a, C-v, etc. while in insert mode. This means > I'm using two editors at once: vim and Emacs. In Evil, many very basic key > bindings do wildly different things when switching from normal to insert > mode and back: C-f, C-b, C-v, etc. Vim doesn't suffer from this (much) > because insert mode is relatively free of key bindings. It is IMHO a bug, not a feature, that, e.g., most (or even all?) M-something keys are not bound in vim's insert mode. > The vi -vs- Emacs dichotomy is always there, creating friction. This is > certainly not the way Emacs would have designed its key commands were modal > editing its initial design goal. I agree that the design goal of Evil is (IIUC) to reproduce the vim experience as closely as possible in Emacs. Still I think that Emacs can do certain things (even about editing, not just about "being an operating system") better than vi, and therefore I appreciate if these features remain accessible in Evil. (OK, maybe as a customizable flag.) But I might just be a privileged minority. If the main goal of Evil is to give die-hard vim users an "operating system" (which vim doesn't quite do), I am not in the target audience. I had advanced experience with both Emacs and vim before starting to use Evil. (In short, I had been using Emacs for writing large files, and vim for reading or for writing small files.) Now I appreciate being able to use the best of both editors in one editor. Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, http://www.facebook.com/ch.lange, Skype duke4701 _______________________________________________ implementations-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/implementations-list
