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."

Comments

Finally

[enec]

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... ;)

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1980's called and wants its joke back.

Re:Finally

[DarwinSurvivor]

2013 called and emacs users still want a text editor.

Re:Finally

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

VIM users would call, but a phone isn't in the orignal VI editor, so they don't have one.

Re:Finally

[kthreadd]

Here you go.
https://github.com/emacsmirror/linphone

Re:Finally

[BrokenHalo]

Some people don't have a Facebook account because they grew up in the 1970s and...

...well, some people don't have a facefook account because they grew up.

Um, why?

[Citizen of Earth]

If you want to use vim, why wouldn't you just use vim?

Re:Um, why?

[JWW]

This vim is for emacs users who just know vi is better but don't want to fully admit it.....

Re:Um, why?

[MoonFog]

This is the world of open source software, "because we can" is ALWAYS a perfectly acceptable reason :)

Re:Um, why?

[spintriae]

Because vim users would like to take advantage of nice emacs goodies like Slime without changing the way they edit text.

Re:Um, why?

[chromas]

and the vi-curious.

Re:Um, why?

[TheRaven64]

Emacs scripting is better than that in vim. Vim's scripting language is an abomination, and although it has some scripting bridges to other languages, they are not always installed and bring in big external dependencies. On the other hand, emacs' user interface works on the assumption that a 105-key keyboard means a 105-fingered user. Being able to use emacs' scripting facilities with vim's interface might be quite tempting.

waiting for ed

[Anonymous Coward]

If vim and emacs merged into one application, would the resulting application donate Richard Stallman to Uganda?

'Sup Dog?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

VI VI VI

[0WaitState]

vi vi vi, the editor of the beast.

Funny Story...

[Greyfox]

Back in the 90's one of the contracting gigs I took was security auditing code for Data General, for their B2 unix certification. Our team was mostly doing the C standard library but once we finished that we started working on the utilities. One of my co-workers got vi (I got awk and telnetd, but that's another funny story entirely.) He wasn't a fan of vi when he started but he turned into a vi guru and fanatic as he started going through the code. At one point I mentioned that Emacs had a vi emulation, and he started going over it to see how it differed from real vi. I seem to recall that he thought it was a pretty good emulation overall, but he lamented the lack of a couple of fairly esoteric features of vi. We also found a comment in there from the 70's about how the author didn't really like how he was handling something to do with the terminal handling, with a note to fix it one of these days.

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.

Re:Funny Story...

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess you had to be there, eh?

Re:What about viper mode?

[Celarent Darii]

Viper mode is good, but it is at times confusing, especially when you confuse it with too many Escapes. Evil has quite a few more features too. Both are good projects, though I think Evil has progressed more.

Original vi

[Anonymous Coward]

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.