Evil Begins

Deprecated If you want an easy way to get started with an Emacs/Vim hybrid, these days Spacemacs is probably your best choice.

Overview

Are you a Vim user? Tempted to try Emacs? This is for you.

About

I’m a Vim user. My two favourite implementations of Vim are:

1. Vim. (Most operating systems.)
2. Evil. (Emacs OS only.)

If you want to try option 2, (for reasons including, but not limited to, Clojure awesomeness), this should give you a good starting point. Broadly speaking, it gives you Vim-style editing in an Emacs environment.

Getting Started.

The “try before you buy” setup is:

$ git clone https://github.com/krisajenkins/EvilBegins.git
$ cd EvilBegins

$ ( HOME=`pwd` emacs )

# Alternatively OSX Users might prefer:
$ ( HOME=`pwd` open /Applications/Emacs.app/ )

That’ll let you give it a spin without making any changes outside the cloned directory. (Note that the first time it runs, it’ll download a truckload of dependencies, so you’ll need to be patient.)

Play around, and if you like what you see then:

$ cp ./.emacs ~/

…to make it your default emacs setup.

Feedback

This project will never be exactly like Vim, and it’s not supposed to be. Emacs is a different beast. Rather, the aim is to allow you to carry your muscle-memory across to a new environment.

If you try this project and immediately miss Feature X, please let me know. It should probably be in here, especially if it’s a built-in feature of Vim.

If you try this project and a week later miss Feature X, please let me know anyway - I’d like to help - but it probably means you’re ready to dive deeper into Emacs.

Credit

This all stands on the glorious shoulders of evil-mode. All I’m really doing is packaging it up in an easy-to-get-started fashion.