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Evil, Almost Full Vim Implementation In Emacs, Reaches 1.0
New submitter karijes writes "Evil is a new Emacs major mode intended to implement full Vim emulation for Emacs editor, and it's reached its first stable release. Evil implements many Vim features and has support for plugins, so there is port for rails.vim, NERDCommenter and mapleader among others. You can find details about this release on the mailing list."
So finally Emacs gets a text editor! I must say, it's a nice operating system but it's been missing a text editor for quite a while... ;)
I'm sorry, I only accept criticism in the form of sed expressions.
Didn't emacs already have this: viper mode? Or was that just straight vi? I for one liked viper mode so I am going to try this new mode out.
If you want to use vim, why wouldn't you just use vim?
If vim and emacs merged into one application, would the resulting application donate Richard Stallman to Uganda?
I heard you like to edit text, so I put a text editor in your text editor so you can edit text while you edit text.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
vi vi vi, the editor of the beast.
Remain calm! All is well!
vi? emacs? no normal English speaker knows what these words mean. Do you need to be a cunnilinguist to use these programs?
FTFY.
The answer of the question in the correct form above is "Highly probable": after an age, even if still interested in a sexual life, that's about all you can do (and you need to have a certain age to know how to use both vi and emacs).
Now... get off my lawn, kids.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I never liked that newfangled vim. It's far too... colorful. I usually swap it out for nvi, which is much more vi-like. Distributions (like Redhat) that install pico as the default editor make me punch someone. Maybe the guy who thought pico should be considered in any way an acceptable UNIX editor. I always have to swear, abort back to the command line, and export VISUAL=vi.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm going back to only supporting closed source software.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Vim is a cleaning powder. It doesn't suck, it scrubs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Try this in Vim:
(ESC) : !emacs %e
Edit your file in emacs and then return to vim (just load file "L").
Your welcome.
Try this for your amusement:
Launch emacs.
Step 1: M-x term ; screen vim :!emacs
Step 2: in vim type
Step 3: return to step 1
You can stack as many sessions as you want. Why you would want to do that is of course completely your affair.
Every time you post 875, someone's going to have to post 1072.
For those of you old enough to remember the original vi, with a very limited set of commands and no support for the cursor keys:
Once we were trying to explain to an MS-DOS Wordstar user how the VI editor works. Here's what we come up with:
Vi is an editor with two distinguished modes:
In Edit mode you have all the capabilities of grandma's typewriter right under your finger tips! You can make the very same mistakes as you did with granny's typewriter and your possibilities to correct them are about the same.
That's why Vi was provided with a second mode, namely the Beep mode. On a vt100 terminal or compatible you can get into Beep mode by pressing an arrow or escape function key. In this powerful Beep mode even the more innocuous keystroke will promptly produce a Beep sound. As an example, arrows, return, blank spaces and most capital letters will produce beeps in the most arbitrary places of the screen. Just think about the whole world of possibilities that this mode gives to you:
--Compose a monotonic symphony or rap while editing your thesis!
--Send messages in Morse code to the secretary next door!
--Keep yourself awake with the clear sound of the Beep tone!
The variations are endless.
I started to agree with you, but then you went a bogus direction.
"Intelligent people" do understand that it's meaningless (though occasionally amusing) to argue whether vi/m or emacs is better, but that's because they understand that if you've invested the effort to truly learn and use either, that your text editing capability will be far superior to what can be done in any other text editing tool.
Yes, it's just text editing. While there are some new features that crop up from time to time as new tools or formats come along, the basic complexities of text manipulation have been pretty well figured out and solutions implemented for a long time. This is the reason why emacs and vi/m remain so successful, because they remain a collective memory of decades worth of solutions to text manipulation challenges (just as Linux is a collective memory of solutions to computing challenges). There's a whole world "in" there, it just takes a bit of devotion to explore it.
There have not been "superior" alternatives to both. There have been attempts to try to because emacs and vi have steep learning curves. The alternatives have invariably fallen short, however, because while you can dumb down an interface, you lose that ability to effectively tap into that vast pool of solutions emacs and vi offer. You also loose the efficiency gain from their ui philosophy, which may have originated in the 70's low-bandwidth terminal mentality, but guess what, it's still just text on the screen and those old mentalities still have more relevance than you may understand.
The alternatives also all tend to fail to capture the full scope of the capabilities that emacs and vi offer. Someone further up the thread called them 'esoteric'. If your job is to manipulate text all day long, those 'esoteric' factors can have a tremendous impact on your effectiveness.
Muscle memory is, indeed part of it, but not the full story. Its about effective use of my time. It's not that people that use emacs or vi are "thinking to hard", its that people who aren't are working too hard and maybe haven't though enough. While you're scratching your head and waving your mouse pointer around trying to find the right menu to do open to reveal some set of options from which you have to choose which one might or might not fully do the text manipulation task you need it to do, I've already done exactly what I wanted to do with a few keystrokes. The next time it needs to be done, you'll still be wandering through your menus, and it will still just be a few keystroke for me (possibly fewer if I've made a macro). Its about investing the time to learn from the folks that already figured it out, and having a system that makes future repetition of that process as streamlined as possible.
Oh, and universality... you may think Unix is niche, but there sure seems to be a lot of it around. It's pretty hard to find one that doesn't have vi, emacs, or both on it. Macs are also niche, I guess, but there again you'll find vi and emacs just a terminal prompt away. Maybe your world is Windows-centric. I'm sorry, but even there you can easily download either. The investment made in learning the capabilities of either are useable on any system you might encounter. There are few (if any) alternatives that can make the same claim and offer the same features.