I’ve used Evil in Emacs with http://orgmode.org/, after having learned Vim. I’d say Evil is another great, thorough emulation of Vim. It includes even relatively-obscure features like visual block mode, R, K, v_o, :%!sort, ^W window split/switch/close commands, and Vim’s tree undo model.
My only problems with Evil are where Emacs or Emacs plugins’ bindings conflict with Vim bindings, such as v_^G (that is, Ctrl-G in Visual mode) meaning “Quit” instead of “Switch to Select Mode”. Those conflicts aren’t really Evil’s fault – they’re inevitable when combining third-party plugins that don’t explicitly support Evil – but they can be annoying.
I’d say you’re not missing much with Evil that would be in Vim. I suppose you’re mainly missing Vim’s large ecosystem of plugins that are made to work with Vim keybindings and Vim’s editing model – though I see that surround.vim has been ported (https://github.com/timcharper/evil-surround). Plus Vim wouldn’t have Evil’s and Emacs’ keyboard conflicts, of course.
I recall this most recent emacs effort the best of all the previous attempts (Viper etc). I believe there was one thing I couldn't fix:
When in command mode (such as when you type :e etc), hitting back space stops at the last deletion. In Vim, if you continue pressing backspace, the editor cursor starts moving back (as if you're pressing `h` in normal mode). (Did you figure out how to fix this?)
It's the little things like this that have become ingrained in our muscle memory over the course of more than a decade.
I do agree that emacs' scripting environment is better than Vim Script.
I don’t understand your backspace problem. In all of the following cases, Vim 7.3 and Emacs 24 with Evil act the same:
In Command-line mode (by typing `:`), when there is text after ‘:’ and before the cursor, typing Backspace deletes one character behind the cursor. In Command-line mode, if there is no text left but ‘:’, it exits Command-line mode, changing to Normal mode. Emacs displays Quit in this case, while Vim just exits silently. If I press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor in the middle of a line, the cursor moves back one character as if you pressed `h`.
I did just notice an inconsistency with Backspace, but it doesn’t sound like what you’re talking about: if you press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor is at the leftmost column, the cursor wraps to the previous line in Vim, but stays in the same place in Emacs. The cause of that behavior in Vim is the 'whichwrap' option’s value containing “b”. Evil has a rough equivalent to that option in evil-cross-lines (a boolean), but I don’t know if it has an equivalent that lets you selectively enable wrapping only for Backspace and Space. https://bitbucket.org/lyro/evil/issue/247/evil-invert-char-s... implies that there was no exact equivalent as of Febraury 2013.
I'm not an Evil expert, but my experience were that the conflicts with existing Emacs keybindings made things more frustrating. As a vim user interested in Emacs I'm trying to avoid Evil and other "90%" vim emulations from now on as well.
