It works fine as a vim emulation layer, but as a full replacement for vim it does no better than other vim emulations, like IdeaVim. For example, in vim I can hit : to open command line mode followed by ctrl + f to open a mini buffer for ex commands that can be manipulated like any other vim buffer. I use this feature all the time in vim and it isn't available in any of the vim emulation software I've tried. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal in emacs, not disputing that. But the idea that evil mode can simply replace vim and all of its built in functionality? Just not true, at least not currently.
Isn't that the same as q: (you know, such as there is q: , q/ and q?)? In which case, evil implements this as "evil-command-window-ex", which I'm sure you could bind to ctrl + f too (perhaps that should be filed as an issue with evil).
But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.
I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.
Comments
It works fine as a vim emulation layer, but as a full replacement for vim it does no better than other vim emulations, like IdeaVim. For example, in vim I can hit : to open command line mode followed by ctrl + f to open a mini buffer for ex commands that can be manipulated like any other vim buffer. I use this feature all the time in vim and it isn't available in any of the vim emulation software I've tried. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish the same goal in emacs, not disputing that. But the idea that evil mode can simply replace vim and all of its built in functionality? Just not true, at least not currently.
Isn't that the same as q: (you know, such as there is q: , q/ and q?)? In which case, evil implements this as "evil-command-window-ex", which I'm sure you could bind to ctrl + f too (perhaps that should be filed as an issue with evil).
But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.
I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.
Evil can function in the minibuffer too which is somewhat similar. Regardless, the idea that Evil is no better than IdeaVim is kind of ridiculous.