Evil Mode: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs 

you need to be a brave person to show off Emacs in a vi conference, well done mate.

I love that when he gets to "and now I use emacs" there is TOTAL SILENCE in the room. You could hear a pin drop. Tough crowd.

"Unloading vim plugins is such a pain that Tim Pope wrote a plugin for it." Is easily my favorite line ever.

This video was _the_ gateway for me switching from Vim to Emacs. Now Emacs is my window manager, for God sake.

I got into Emacs because of this video. I didn't understand anything he was talking about. Less than a year later I understand what he's doing. Nice one Aaron.

Fast forward 7 years and Neovim has become such a polished editor and is back to back most loved editor in stackoverflow developer surveys. Lua was a great choice due to its high performance, light weight and embedded nature a very strong ecosystem has now developed around it, also there is this huge Neovim community. The best plugins are now written in Lua (e.g. Telescope). Built in support for LSP also makes it great for development coupled with TreeSitter integration we can now do things in Neovim that would not be possible otherwise because the editor is now aware of language constructs and can be made to walk and manipulate the AST itself. I wonder if it now addresses all of Aaron Bieber's concerns.

17:00 Oh. Oh no. Watching this after Bram's passing feels... weird.

I love that when I learned vi in 1994 that the vi/emacs culture still exists. Meta-x doctor was a solid companion those late nights in the computer lab.

Damn you, Bieber. It's taken me this long to watch this talk, and you took 40 minutes to solve a quandary I've found myself in for literally 10 years.

"The kitchen sink goes in emacs" - My favourite part of this whole video

This guy talked me into Emacs. I come from Vim. It took me some time to figure out how to get Evil mode up, but now I find I don't use it that often anymore. Got to go, I have to order an Emacs shirt!

Aaron you've won. After 10 times watching this video, I switched from a hardcore Vimmer to an Emacs Evil lover.

Just wanted to say thank you for the presentation. This got me to explore emacs and vim and my life and workflow are forever changed. Keep doing what you are doing and hopefully provide some more talks in the future!

I'm a non-programmer who uses vim every day for work. Except today - thanks to this video - I started using emacs in evil mode, which combined with org mode is just awesome. Thank you, Aaron and thoughtbot!

Thank you! been trying to move into emacs world. I've tried several times... I knew about evil mode but wanted to learn native emacs... however the key combos would break my balls, so I'd leave it for a while. I saw this presentation and it just spurred me on to just use evil mode and: it. is. a. delight. I'm starting to understand what I've been missing. Looking forward to properly harnessing the power of emacs now!

This talk changed my life..

I'm a die hard Vim user and that talk by the creator of org mode convinced me to use emacs as an organiser. Still not sure If I'm going to give evil mode a try but great talk none the less and I highly recommend org mode. It even makes a pretty schedule for you!

I've watched this talk multiple times over the last couple years and it's honestly one of my favourites. I've switched to emacs, and from emacs multiple times, and whenever I come back to emacs I watch this video. 10:47 is my favourite lmao, I've felt that pain. Thank you for this talk, it's a must watch :)

This is probably the nerdiest thing I've ever watched and I love it

It's so fun to geek around with these editors/systems, though I'm not sure if it really is improves productivity or if it just more like a hobby, like playing with an cool toy.

I love it when he pauses and watches the crowd as if he's expecting them to throw stones at him any second

Well, I'm convinced. *Installs emacs*

This got me excited about the org mode talk, and it wasn't linked in the description, so here's the link: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oJTwQvgfgMM.html

This is blasphemy. I'll give it a go.

Thanks for this. I should do one called: Evil Mode, or how I learned to stop worrying and love vim. :D I am a heavy Emacs user for the past 2 decades, and had always turned my nose up at vim. Not anymore. I now have the best of both worlds. Total Power. Thanks to your video.

With 3 years using VIM, I could totally relate to everything he said.. I guess it's time to finally give it a go .. !

You can run emacs inside neovim from what I hear. All you need to do now is run evil mode inside emacs inside neovim inside emacs inside emacs inside neovim inside ... ;) Also, I love vim, too, and was really proud of myself and commemorating my 1 year anniversary, and you have officially crushed my dreams. :p

It's amazing to watch this about 5 years later and think about how far Neovim has come. Gotta say, how about full Neovim inside of Emacs? Just for fun? :)

Before I just thought if I using Emacs I have to give up on Vim, but after watched this video I'm so happy that I can use both of them, and even more functionality. I just noob as Vim, but I really love the way it does, so that is the great way to learning Vim and Emacs.

Haven't used emacs much but as a relatively experienced Vim/NeoVim user with significant issues with Vim, this video pushed me over the edge to Emacs.

03:40 evil - extensible vi layer 04:32 org mode - note taking & task list mgmt software package 04:50 modes in emacs - just a collection of behaviour of emacs - major mode like filetype in vim - minor mode like plugins (ohhw, so, org mode is basically emacs behaviour preset for org files, ohkay, got it now) 05:19 unloading a plugin in vim is hard ... 07:01 requirement of managing gigantic codebase containing tonnes of files 08:48 we ask bram for it ....

This appears to be the answer to what I've been looking for! I love vim, but I have been wanting to stay in my editor and do more from one place. I cannot stand the finger strain of of normal emacs. I'm about to try this

I think the main difference between vim and emacs is if you want to put everything in the editor or if you want to use your text editor for editing text and, say, a pdf viewer for viewing pdfs (if the thought of having two separate programs side by side makes you uncomfortable, look into a tile based window manager, that's where everything properly clicked for me). If you want to do everything from the editor and like hjkl then evil mode is probably the right choice for you. If you want a set of specialized tools that you use for different purposes then vim is a good choice for the text editor part of that tool belt.

i remember when i first got interested in Vim, it was another talk from this same conference that really paved the way and got me excited about it. i remember seeing this one as well at the time, perhaps partially, and i just didn't really understand why this was really interesting because i was new to this world. now years later and much more knowledge about vim and the world of personalized development environments, i feel like im finally ready to switch to emacs. now time to start a new learning curve all over again, but i feel like this time this is what i've been looking for

That is a lot of enthusiasm. Great. I feel like trying the things you showed.

I have yet to hit that wall where Vim can't do something for me, but this video was still very interesting to watch.

Thank you. You gave me reason to try evil mode on emacs.

It would be cool if this whole presentation could be updated to be current. I'm especially interested in how far along NeoVim has come along. I tried it around 6 months ago and there were a few things (which I can't recall) that made me go back to Bra(vi)m. I was hoping multi-threaded async syntax highlighting would crack the unsolved problem of the epic Ruby highlighting slowdown. But NVim was also slow. Maybe not quite as bad, but still slow enough to be very annoying. I wonder how well emacs/evil/Ruby works?

To think of it, as a programmer I spend approximately 5% of my time actually typing code. Good 40% is architecturing, planning, thinking and remaining 55% is debugging/investigating stuff. So even if I typed 100 times faster, it would just save me less than 5% of time overall.

Using vim for many years, i didnt feel the need to try Emacs. Thanks to you, or because of you, i am gonna give it a try. Thanks for the great talk.

Neovim: Literally improved in every aspect except the icon/logo

Perfect! Awesome presentation Aaron, thanks! Now I know what to do. I will start learning Vim so I have it available everywhere I go. Then I'll get emacs with evil mode.

what I am confused is that everytime I finish editing a file when I press :q it exists emacs entirely. Is that really how its suppose to work? Do I need to fire up new emacs everytime?

I would have probably have become a fan of emacs back when I was using it on a DG minicomputer, but that port of it had a fatal bug that never got fixed. Since then, every unix variant I've used had a dozen different free, intuitive text editors. That, and after learning the basics of using vi's clever interface from habitually playing nethack, I adopted vi/vim and never looked back. If you like a version of emacs, that's nice.

I learned emacs a few months ago and really love it. Now I'm learning vim, because I love the editing in vim. Evil is perfect to me. I can use hjkl to move and the vim modes, and the powerful emacs shortcuts. Maybe heresy for someone, but works perfect to me

Ctrl-G can be binded to Esc or at least repeated Esc everywhere in Emacs, though not easily, maybe. There's some code in ErgoEmacs package for that, actually

Thanks for changing my life I'm using doom emacs and I'm really happy with emacs power

The only way to go is "ed". ed is the standard text editor. ?

I skipped evil mode and just went straight to emacs directly part of it was that I was only using it for like a month but still I found it a lot easier to not mix key bindings

16:56 This one hits different after Bram's death.

Cool! How do you set about the emacs? which plugins do you install ? Can you share Your settings?

vim is that thing I use before installing emacs on a new system

How can I get the theme and mode line the speaker is using? I really like the mode line.

What software is he using for the presentation? It's obviously rendered in the browser, but the backend is some Python server (visible in the terminal at 32:20), probably Flask, but does someone know the specific package he's using?

I actually started trying evil for a month after seeing this video, but then went back to vim. I felt emacs + evil did solve some edge cases in vim but has its own edge cases, Also evil seemed not to be a first class citizen in emacs, because I was forced to do things in the emacs way every now and then. The hardest thing to get used to when I switched from vim to emacs, was actually not vim, but the terminal. I just couldn't stand the terminal inside emacs, so I had to switch back and forth between emacs and terminal, which broke the "do everything inside emacs" anyway.

Fantastic, TY!!

Awesome, will give it a try.

Waiting for the said blog post of starting life on emacs in 14 days

Hi, could you please help me out? I am trying to make go-to-definition working in python and javascript without success. It works in a single file but doesn't in a big project with multiple files and subdirectories. I am using spacemacs with python and javascript modes

Btw what smartwatch is he wearing? Looks pretty slick, does anyone know?

I should learn lisp.

how is he doing the presentation in browser? looks cool i would like to do that! can anyone tell me how

18:00 But with Emacs, you don’t need it to be installed on every machine. You can ssh from emacs to a remote machine. So you don’t have to install emacs on the remote machine

@23:37 what plugin is that? I'd love to use it

what is he using for switching buffers ?

It seems a lot of these features are now equally possible with neovim, but Org mode does look nice, so I'm thinking about using emacs/org for note taking in the future, instead of writing markdown in vim. I wonder if vim or emacs (plugins included) has better Java development support currently?

I'm a heavy vim user and yet, I must admit he does have a point when referring to the existence of Neovim Not sure how neatly Emacs works out of the box with LSPs though

I'm an emacs user since 1988. But I've never used org mode. I'll give it a try.

DO you hate when someone says PC when refering to MS Windows? I do.

The Vim community has been infiltrated! And now I feel the need to try emacs ....

He's a really brave guy and I like his sense of humour also. :)

Awesome!

:term does use your shell, just tried it and it called zsh without a hitch

25:23: Treesitter has entered the chat Jokes aside it's a great talk and it's crazy to see most of the problem mentioned already solved by neovim

Emacs and Vim killed my productivity issues. I guess it just provided me clarity

Might be worth a try at some point. That said, I've noticed a lot of talk about the meta key - does that generally refer to the Alt key or the actual Meta (aka Windows) key on the keyboard? I mostly ask because my window manager uses the actual Meta key for pretty much all of its keyboard shortcuts...

great talk

what presentation tool is he using? looks cool.

what application are you using to give your presentation? I've seen these before, with the blue arrows on the bottom right hand corner...

Have always wanted vim tables. That is probably enough to look at this.

does everything electronJS editors do, except 1000x faster and use 1/1000 memory in comparison. Amazing

Does anyone know which theme did he use in emacs? I really liked that cool status bar!!!

5:00 I need to watch this talk, that he talked about regarding orgmode

How to set it up??

Which theme is that on emacs he has?

I was on board until I tried Emacs in 2018... I just wasted about three days learning and configuring Emacs. I even dropped evil mode and went raw Emacs native shortcuts... experiencing RSI-like symptoms just after two days... half cooked modes, things not being looked after. Not a single You Complete Me like completion system. Couldn't make company work for me the same way. Just ended up sad that I couldn't make the switch. Then went back, cleaned up my .vimrc and have lived even happier than before for ever-after. emacs-nox just didn't cut it for a terminal junkie like me. Well, at least Emacs made me learn proper buffer handling for Vim :D

What theme is he using?

I have a lower powered laptop. I tried emacs abt 2years ago but found it, slow to startup compared to vim (too big bloated?) and when I tried to open a file form terminal into emacs it would open another emacs! I tried a few hacks but could not sort this out.

which theme is this?

Vim meetups and talks like these are the only way to stay sane.

\C-v - the v is like a arrow pointing down, that's why.

that title is baller

Is emacs still a good choice, or nvim and jscode is 😮 or subilne is 😊

This is more of an indictment of Windows, but I started using emacs because neovim has too many unexplained behaviors. In the era of treesitter and LSP, neovim will not acknowledge they exist outside of my local vim configuration. Which means I have to simlink my repos to a dummy directory that's inside ~/AppData/Local/nvim/. It will not lint, it will not autoformat, it will not do anything of the sort unless the file I'm editing is under init...lua. Yeah, I understand why a simple scripting language might be superior to vimscript, but that's for plugin writers -- if you're an ordinary vimmer, everything depends on how much of the vim api you're aware of. So now I have to configure with a layer of lua on top of vimscript, which 90% of the time is just me hacking with vim.cmd [[ autocmd.... ]]. On the other hand, emacs' lsp's require more than vim's: the python lsp needs you to have python installed in a virtual environment. I don't. Don't wanna. And other LSP's need to compile, like Rust. With neovim it's much simpler: it's almost always "do you have the executable? Okay we're good, carry on." Evil mode is actually excellent, so far. I'm still in emacs boot camp, having my computer lock up and forcing a hardware reboot one too many times because some neovim plugin wrote somewhere in memory that it shouldn't have (I'm looking at you, neotree.) When the only hard system fails my computer has ever experienced have been caused by my editor, that's not good. I don't know, neovim would be perfect, if each update didn't cause breaking changes to your init (I'm writing this shortly after 0.7 came out). I don't need the rest of the emacs operating system -- I have a hacked tiled window manager in windows: I just open Sumatra: what's the big deal? Also, as someone who actually programs in Common Lisp, having to edit in elisp is like writing in python 2 & 3 at the same time. Both programs are great though. They're too good -- once you have your editor *just right*, you can never settle for anything less ever again. (fwiw, nobody mentioned that emacs was the second windowed system ever created -- the first was a lisp machine with a REPL -- both written by Stallman. That was what Apple sued Microsoft over: "yeah, well we stole his ideas and monetized them FIRST". Also, vim originated in the Commodore Amiga, a machine that by everything I saw, and everything I heard, was vastly superior to the other two desktop systems available, and had maybe 5% market share, tops, because they didn't advertise.)

you got me hocked.

vi-able option

This is what my friend told me before sending me the link to this video. "Would you like to watch an extremely nerdy and cute guy resembling Ryan Gosling explain some CS stuff you know nothing about?"

How much does this still hold up?

Until brief intro to this video I considered Emacs unworthy of my attention comparing to Vim, but now ... I consider to re-consider.

what is the name of the song 0:00 - 0:12 ?