I see so many emacs things that look cool.

I have vim mainly customised with language servers and the like, which seems counter to vim's philisophy and closer to emacs.

So I'd love to experiment with emacs properly. But it's so painful; I'm just so much faster at everything with vim. I understand there are things like evil and spacemacs to ease the transition, but every time I try them, I just come straight back to what I'm comfortable with.

Is there anyone else who jumped from vim to emacs. Do you have any tips apart from perserverance?

fileeditview

I went from vim to emacs with evil mode (i used the doom distribution, which I think is great). However I went back after some months of usage. The main reason is performance. Many plugins are just not very performant with elisp but without them emacs is pointless for me. Also vim has better support for more languages in terms of LSP. In emacs I ran into a lot of outdated plugin issues.

I have customized my vim now with shortcuts very similar to Doom/spacemacs and many plugins. I am very happy with my setup at the moment. I don't care if it is against the vim philosophy as long as I get stuff done with it :)

My tip: if you want to try out emacs with evil, try the doom distribution. If you become a convert you still can configure your own if you want/need to later on.

sirn

I would suggest a step further: start with Spacemacs/Doom, but if you decide to stick around, try to build your own Emacs configuration based on the part of Spacemacs/Doom that you like.

Thanks to the amazing use-package[1] macro (which Spacemacs/Doom also uses) most configurations are self-contained to a certain extent. Searching for use-package in GitHub[2] will yields plenty of results which can be mostly be taken as a reference for your own liking. It should be relatively easy to port part of Spacemacs/Doom to vanilla use-package, e.g. starting with this (which sets up use-package alongside with evil):

    (require 'package)
    (setq package-enable-at-startup nil)
    (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))

    (package-initialize)
    (unless (package-installed-p 'use-package)
      (package-refresh-contents)
      (package-install 'use-package))

    (eval-when-compile
      (require 'use-package))

    (use-package evil
      :ensure t
      :config
      (evil-mode t) 

    (use-package evil-leader
      :after evil
      :ensure t
      :config
      (evil-leader/set-leader "")
      (global-evil-leader-mode t))

To add Magit, one could take a look at Spacemacs's git/packages.el[2], search documentation on what each package does, and proceed on porting configuration, only the part that you actually uses, e.g.:

    (use-package evil-magit
      :ensure t
      :after (magit evil))

    (use-package magit
      :ensure t
      :config
      (evil-leader/set-key ("gs" #'magit-status))

Since most configurations based on use-package are self-contained, when stuck I also like to use GitHub search to look on how other people configure a certain package[3]. In most cases the configuration should be reusable as-is.

Finally, use-package is highly extensible. There is straight.el[4] which adds extension to use-package to fetch from Git and pin a version in a lockfile, which adds reproducibility to Emacs configuration. There's also el-patch[5] from the same author that allows patching package on the fly without the need to maintain separate forks.

[1]: https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

[2]: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/d46eacd83842815b2...

[3]: https://github.com/search?l=Emacs+Lisp&p=4&q=use-package&typ...

[4]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el

[5]: https://github.com/raxod502/el-patch