[gnosis]

After over 20 years of very happily using vim and other vi-clones, I'm in the process of making emacs+evil my main editor.

Making the switch is slow and painful for this veteran vim user who has perfected his vim environment, but I can already see that the emacs environment that I build will be superior... eventually.

Plus, I get the joy of scripting my editor in elisp and eventually guile (I hope). No more vimscript for me!

That said, vim is a wonderful editor. Even if vim ultimately isn't as flexible as emacs, it's still incredibly powerful; and there's a lot of cross-fertilization going on between the two editors, with vim users getting inspired by emacs features and packages and writing vim equivalents and vice-versa.

[eric-hu]

I'm thinking of making the switch. Are you able to port your vim plugins to emacs in evil mode?

[gnosis]

I don't know if it's possible to automatically port vim plugins to evil. However, according to the emacswiki page on evil[1], a number of vim plugins have been ported:

  evil-surround:       Port of Vim’s surround script.
  evil-numbers:        Vim-like increment and decrement.
  evil-leader:         Port of Vim’s mapleader.
  evil-rails:          Port of rails.vim.
  evil-nerd-commenter: Port of Vim’s Nerd-Commenter

Also, there are many emacs packages that provide functionality that's more or less equivalent to various vim plugins (sometimes even unenhanced emacs will already be capable of doing what you need).

Just a couple of tips for vim fans giving emacs+evil a go:

  * Don't expect to quickly master emacs or quickly be able
    to replicate the vim environment you spent years
    perfecting.  Getting emacs set up nicely will take a lot
    of learning, tweaking and hacking (especially if you
    want to make it more vim-like).  Be prepared for that.

  * Come to #emacs and #evil-mode on freenode for help.

  * You might want to go through the emacs tutorial (C-h t)
    before you install evil or do any other customizations.
    That'll teach you some basics of emacs that you'll run
    in to elsewhere, and help minimize confusion.

  * Search the emacswiki[2] on any topics you're interested
    in.  There's a lot of good stuff there.

[1] - http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

[2] - http://www.emacswiki.org

[ics]

I use both regularly, but considering the investments involved I would say that I "switched to emacs" and vim is simply there when I need it.

I agree with your tips but the one thing I would add is that if you're worried about porting your vim plugins, don't. I use evil and the evil-plugins you listed happily, but beyond those awaits a vast world of emacs plugins from hordes of emacs.d hoarders, ready to eval your kinkiest, textiest dreams.

Basically, don't get hung up on plugins. They exist because they don't make up the core of your editor, and if you find yourself liking emacs even a little bit then it is very likely you'll find a suitable replacement for each of those functions.