[aidenn0]

I guess again coming from the point of view of a vim user, I have friends who struggle to use my vim setup because I don't have surround.vim (a common plugin) installed. They use features in it multiple times per minute. For them a complete clone of the vim UI that didn't include an equivalent plugin would be insufficiently vim-like for them to switch.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Yeah, this is where evil-mode sort of shines: I was able to go through my vim configuration feature-by-feature and more or less recreate it in my emacs configuration. A couple years later, I have a sort of hybrid vim-emacs config (smartparens for most cases where I would have used surround.vim before) that works really nicely.