Vim to Emacs' Evil chaotic migration guide

I’ve been using Vim for 18 years, and for me it was the only option for serious text work (like programming or writing) because I’m totally addicted to modal text editing to the point that I feel crippled when I’ve to edit text in a non-modal editor. You may argue that programming is not about how fast you write and you would be right, but if you can imagine somebody programming on an on screen keyboard on a tablet, you know how modal editor users feel about non modal edition.

But as many Vimmers, I was always curious about Emacs (the enemy in the editor flamewars!), it’s operating-system-in-a-window and the Lisp virtual machines concepts but the non-modal editing and the low quality of the existing modal editing modes compared with Vim made me keep a sane distance from it.

But then, Evil-mode happened. Evil mode is being developed as a perfect Vim emulation for Emacs. Some of its developers have publicly stated that Vim is the model and if something works differently than in Vim it should be marked as a bug. I’ve been hearing very good things about Evil-mode, and when some of my old Vimmers contacts made the switch I knew the mode should be very good.

So two weeks ago I installed Emacs and Evil and started to configure everything to my liking. My first objective was to have an editing environment as efficient as the one I’ve in Vim, with the same plugins and shortcuts. I didn’t expected to really reach that point in a long time, because I heard than Emacs has less plugins than Vim and I expected to have a hard time creating my dotfiles using Elisp. After two weeks of intense investigation, googling, Elisp accelerated learning, reading of other people’s dotfiles and tinkering I can say that I was very wrong. Not only I’ve an environment where I didn’t lost almost anything to my highly-tuned Vim, but I also got gains in some other areas (and I still haven’t started to play with the famous Org mode or Gnus).

This article is a pretty chaotic recollection of bits about how I turned Emacs into my Vim, and then how I improved over it. Most of the items will be bits of Elisp code for the config file or info about plugins. My hope is that this article will be useful to other Vim power users trying Emacs+Evil because I would have loved to find an article like this when I was starting.

This article has been written with the help of lot of random people whose configs, articles an answers I had the luck to land after some internet search, mostly from StackOverflow, GitHub, and random forums. To keep the article clean, I don’t always cite the source of the snippets but you could easily find most of them just googling the code.

You can also check my Emacs’ dotfiles if you’re interested, but remember that these are newbie dotfiles so I’m probably doing something stupid on them. As you’ll see, my config is split between several files. I advise you to don’t do this from the start, but to dump everything into your .emacs file because it is easier to experiment and change a lot when you’re starting (and if you’re a little like me you’ll be playing a lot with your config) and once you’ve more or less settled on a config, split it into categories. Oh, and keep Vim at hand to fix your Emacs config the several times you’ll broke it.

A good Windows version

I’ve to use Windows at work and I was having a lot of problems with the official version of Emacs for Windows (slowness, unstability, huge memory usage spikes…). Reddit’s user tuhdo read about my woes and suggested two versions of third party packages of Windows Emacs. I’ve tested both and I can say that this one is definitively the best and solves all my problems.

Basic Emacs survival keys

If you’re a Vim user after installing Evil you’ll be using Vim-style commands most of the time, but to install Evil first and for some modes where Evil doesn’t work (like the package manager) you’ll need some basic cheatsheet of Emacs commands.

  • C-g (that is Control and g at the same time) to cancel prompts. Later we’ll remap the escape key to do the same which anyone coming from Vim will need to retain its sanity.
  • C-x k to kill (close) a buffer. Automatically opened windows are usually closeable with “q”.
  • C-x o (that’s an “o” not a zero) to rotate between window
  • C-x 2 to create an horizontal split (window)
  • C-x 3 to create a vertical split
  • M-x (M = Alt on PC) shows the “minibuffer” where you can call Emacs functions. Later I’ll show how to improve it a lot.
  • To toggle long lines wrapping (like set wrap/nowrap in Vim), do M-x visual-line-mode RET.
  • C-y: yank/paste. The only way to paste on the modeline even when you’re using Evil.

Package management

The integrated plugin (package in emacspeak) manager is pretty good. It lists, downloads, updates and install the packages in a breeze. I’ve tested almost all of Vim’s plugin managers and neither of them is close to this. You start it with M-x list-packages (enter to install, d to delete, x to execute deletions).

To add more sources to the package managers and to have a function that will load packages and install them if missing (useful if you move your config between computers) put this on your config file:

;; packages
(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                         ("org" . "http://orgmode.org/elpa/")
                        ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
                         ("melpa-stable" . "http://melpa-stable.milkbox.net/packages/")))
(package-initialize)

(defun require-package (package)
(setq-default highlight-tabs t)
“Install given PACKAGE."
(unless (package-installed-p package)
(unless (assoc package package-archive-contents)
(package-refresh-contents))
(package-install package)))

Note: as Phil suggested in the comments, the non-stable Melpa repository is risky to have for newbies since it pulls directly from git master, I’ve used melpa-stable in the config example, if you want to use Melpa just remove the “-stable” from both the name and URL in the config.

Evil (Vim emulation)

It’s fucking impressive. I don’t miss any text command, operator, motion or work flow from Vim. Marks, paragraph reformatting, visual mode, visual block, macros, registers, text objects, splits (vertical, horizontal, :normal, folding, etc)… it has almost everything.

Of course Vim plugins doesn’t work, but there are Emacs or Evil alternatives for most of them.

Themes

You can use M-x load-theme RET to check the available themes (you can install more with the package manager). Once you have chosen one theme, put in .emacs: (load-theme 'misterioso t).

Terminal Colors

By default, most themes look like shit on terminal Emacs (emacs -nw if you don’t want the window to open). On Vim some themes too, but in Emacs this happens with almost all of them. This can improve a lot installing the color-theme-approximate package with makes the same thing as CSApprox in Vim: translate colors to their console equivalents. Once installed add this to your .emacs: (color-theme-approximate-on). If it doesn’t work try to put the line lower in the .emacs file (it happened to me). If everything still look like shit check that you have the correct TERM environment variable set (hint: is different inside screen or tmux).

Change cursor color depending on mode

This is something that I liked to have in Vim. Fortunately, you can also have it in Emacs. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to get in working on non-GUI emacs:

(setq evil-emacs-state-cursor '("red" box))
(setq evil-normal-state-cursor '("green" box))
(setq evil-visual-state-cursor '("orange" box))
(setq evil-insert-state-cursor '("red" bar))
(setq evil-replace-state-cursor '("red" bar))
(setq evil-operator-state-cursor '("red" hollow))

Tabs

If you install the evil-tabs package and enable it with (global-evil-tabs-mode t) you’ll have :tabnew, gt and friends with numbered tabs by default. Showing the tab number is a very useful feature when you can change to a tab with #gt like in Vim (with # being a number from 0 to 9), but unfortunately this package doesn’t support #gt but I worked it around with my awesome Elisp skills (close to zero):

(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-0") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 0)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C- ") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 0)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-1") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 1)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-2") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 2)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-3") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 3)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-4") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 4)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-5") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 5)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-6") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 6)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-7") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 7)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-8") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 8)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-9") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 9)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-0") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 0)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C- ") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 0)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-1") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 1)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-2") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 2)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-3") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 3)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-4") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 4)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-5") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 5)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-6") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 6)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-7") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 7)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-8") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 8)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-9") (lambda() (interactive) (elscreen-goto 9)))

Somebody with better Elisp skills please help me with a less kludgy solution, but this works (and it’s in fact one key press less than #gt).

Leader key

In order to define an use a <leader> prefix for your personal shortcuts you have to install the package evil-leader and put lines like these on your .emacs (I use comma as a leader key):

(global-evil-leader-mode)
(evil-leader/set-leader ",")

Later, I found that the key didn’t work on some modes (like when editing the .emacs file in emacs-lisp-mode), but the package FAQ solved the problem, you have to add this before the global-evil-leader-mode setting:

(setq evil-leader/in-all-states 1)

Sessions (:mksession in Vim)

Emacs have the commands M-x desktop-save and desktop-read. To have it automatically saved/restored put into the .emacs: (desktop-save-mode 1). If you want to start emacs without auto loading the session (if you configured it), the command is emacs --no-desktop. But Emacs sessions doesn’t know about elscreens (which evil-tabs use for creating Vim-like tabs) so if you want to save and restore full sessions including tabs copy these functions into your config file and assign them some shortcut:

;; Save session including tabs
;; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22445670/save-and-restore-elscreen-tabs-and-split-frames
(defun session-save ()
    "Store the elscreen tab configuration."
    (interactive)
    (if (desktop-save emacs-configuration-directory)
        (with-temp-file elscreen-tab-configuration-store-filename
            (insert (prin1-to-string (elscreen-get-screen-to-name-alist))))))

;; Load session including tabs
(defun session-load ()
“Restore the elscreen tab configuration."
(interactive)
(if (desktop-read)
(let ((screens (reverse
(read
(with-temp-buffer
(insert-file-contents elscreen-tab-configuration-store-filename)
(buffer-string))))))
(while screens
(setq screen (car (car screens)))
(setq buffers (split-string (cdr (car screens)) ":"))
(if (eq screen 0)
(switch-to-buffer (car buffers))
(elscreen-find-and-goto-by-buffer (car buffers) t t))
(while (cdr buffers)
(switch-to-buffer-other-window (car (cdr buffers)))
(setq buffers (cdr buffers)))
(setq screens (cdr screens))))))

Accents

Accents didn’t work for me on GUI mode, only in text mode. That was fixed adding (require 'iso-transl) to my .emacs.

“After” macro definition

I have an “after” macro defined that I copied from someone config file (can’t remember who - sorry). This is useful to specifiy code to be executed after some plugin has loaded.

The definition is on my config file as:

;; "after" macro definition
(if (fboundp 'with-eval-after-load)
    (defmacro after (feature &rest body)
      "After FEATURE is loaded, evaluate BODY."
      (declare (indent defun))
      `(with-eval-after-load ,feature ,@body))
  (defmacro after (feature &rest body)
    "After FEATURE is loaded, evaluate BODY."
    (declare (indent defun))
    `(eval-after-load ,feature
       '(progn ,@body))))))

Vim-like search highlighting

I prefer how Vim’s highlight search and left the highlighted terms until you make another search or clean the highlighted terms. I tough this would be easy to get but it turned it wasn’t so easy (for me). At the end I made my first Emacs extension (and the first time I’ve programmed in Lisp since the university a long time ago…) so all turned well. The extension is already on Melpa has the very brief name of evil-search-highlight-persist. You can enable it with:

(require 'evil-search-highlight-persist)
(global-evil-search-highlight-persist t)

To map a shortcut (leader-space) to clear the highlights I have:

(evil-leader/set-key "SPC" 'evil-search-highlight-persist-remove-all)

I must note that another good way to search in Emacs is to use occur or helm-occur. This will show the search results on a list (on a split window with occur) and you’ll be able to jump easily to any match.

Helm: Unite/CtrlP style fuzzy file/buffer/anything searcher on steroids

Helm does the same thing as Unite/CtrlP on Vim and does it really well. You can also enable Helm to manage the command buffer, which is pretty awesome with: (helm-mode 1) in the .emacs file. I also configured a shortcut in normal mode, SPACE SPACE which is the same I was using with Vim. This can be done with: (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " 'helm-mini).

But Helm can be really configurable and you can include or exclude modules in the helm interface show with the shortcut associated to your config, for example I’ve:

;; helm settings (TAB in helm window for actions over selected items,
;; C-SPC to select items)
(require 'helm-config)
(require 'helm-misc)
(require 'helm-projectile)
(require 'helm-locate)
(setq helm-quick-update t)
(setq helm-bookmark-show-location t)
(setq helm-buffers-fuzzy-matching t)

(after ‘projectile
(package ‘helm-projectile))
(global-set-key (kbd “M-x”) ‘helm-M-x)


(defun helm-my-buffers ()
(interactive)
(let ((helm-ff-transformer-show-only-basename nil))
(helm-other-buffer '(helm-c-source-buffers-list
helm-c-source-elscreen
helm-c-source-projectile-files-list
helm-c-source-ctags
helm-c-source-recentf
helm-c-source-locate)
"helm-my-buffers")))

Here, I define a “helm-my-buffers” function that when called (assign a shortcut to it!) will show Helm interface but searching (fuzzy, real time as you write, unordered) in open buffers, recent files, project files (see below for more on that), tags inside the files, tabs and results from the Linux command locate that searches quickly from a database of all the files in the file system. How awesome is that?

But this is only the tip of the iceberg of Helm power. There are sources for searching the symbols (functions, classes, globals, etc) in the current buffer (helm-imenu), bookmarks (including Chrome/Firefox bookmarks), HTML colors (showing the color, name, and hexadecimal code), apt packages and more.

If you check the sources of the helm-my-buffers function above you can see that I’m also using helm-c-source-projectile-files-list. This will use another installable third party package called Projectile that will search for a git/hg/svn file in the current directory and its parents and extract the current project files. Linking it will Helm makes it super easy to open any file in your current project (providing you’ve it under version control) without having the browse the filesystem, even for files that you have never opened (and thus are not in Emacs’ recent files list).

Another good combination of Helm with a nice Emacs feature (this time included by default) is helm-imenu. iMenu is a pretty smart minor mode that extract “locations” inside a buffer. For code in a programming language this will be typically the classes, methods and other symbols. Calling helm-imenu instead of the default imenu will make it very easy to jump quickly to a location inside the buffer just writing a couple of letters.

Another great feature of Helm is the chance to replace the default “M-x” menu interface. M-x is what you use to issue Emacs commands, a little like “:” in Vim (but only a little, ex mode in Vim or Evil is another kind of animal). One great thing about Emacs is that it has commands and modes for a lot of things, and with Helm M-x you don’t have to learn them all. For example if I don’t remember how to show white space characters I just press M-x and start to write whitesp… and Helm will show me as first result whitespace-mode which is exactly what I want (it also showed whitespace-cleanup that clears all the trailing whitespace and that is how I discovered it). Want to check the commands related to spelling? M-x spell. How to list errors in the code with flycheck? M-x fly errors. How to sort the lines of a selection? M-x sort. This is really convenient and as an Emacs newbie I get a lot of things done just searching in Helm-M-x without having to search on Google. You can map Helm-M-x to M-x with:

(global-set-key (kbd "M-x") 'helm-M-x)

There is another package that also helps when learning to use a specific mode, it’s called “Discover My Major” (discover-my-major in Melpa). Invoking the command with the same name will show all the functions enabled by the current major mode. It’s great to discover what every mode can do.

There is another package that also helps when learning to use a specific mode, it’s called “Discover My Major” (discover-my-major in Melpa). Invoking the command with the same name will show all the functions enabled by the current major mode. It’s great to discover what every mode can do.

Edit: thanks to tuhdo in the comments who told me how to show the full path of the files in the helm-recentf sources).

Vim’s Marks => Evil’s Marks + Emacs’ Bookmarks

Evil has marks just like Vim: m to jump to a mark, m-letter to set a mark, m-uppercase_letter to set a mark that works between buffers. But while marks are pretty useful for example to quickly jump between two or three positions inside some files when you’re coding, Emacs also has the concept of “bookmarks” that are like inter-file marks that you can set with a name (instead of a letter) and that with the elisp bit below in your config file can be saved between sessions. I’m using helm-bookmarks to see and set them, which I’ve mapped to SPC-b. To delete bookmarks, press TAB inside the helm sub-window to see the list of actions and choose “Delete Bookmark(s)”.

;; save bookmarks
(setq bookmark-default-file "~/.emacs.d/bookmarks"
      bookmark-save-flag 1) ;; save after every change

Folding… and narrowing!

Folding with Evil works as expected, using the same operators that in Vim (with the added benefit that if you’re using Helm-M-x you can do M-x RET fold to search the folding commands in case you forgot the Vim-style operator). Emacs also support an interesting feature called “narrowing”. Narrowing will hide everything else in the file except the narrowed function or region. This is pretty useful when you want to make global replaces or run some macro but don’t want to affect the other parts of the buffer. I don’t use it much so I haven’t assigned any shortcut, I just use the commands narrow-to-region and narrow-to-defun. Once you have finished working on the narrowed region, you can display the rest of the buffer again with the widen command.

Project Management

I’ve already mentioned Projectile that combined with Helm makes searching for project files very convenient, but there are other options. One of them is project-explorer, which is pretty much like Vim “project” script: when you enable it it will show a side split (sorry, window) with your project files. With Helm + Helm-Projectile + the file explorer it’s rarely needed but from time to time it’s nice to have a tree view of a source code project (more if the code isn’t yours). The Windows can be opened with the command “project-explorer-open” (I didn’t assign any shortcut to it). One thing to note if you’re using Evil is that the shortcuts like TAB to toggle a folder subtree only work if you’re in insert mode.

(package 'project-explorer)
(after 'project-explorer
  (setq pe/cache-directory "~/.emacs.d/cache/project_explorer")
  (setq pe/omit-regex (concat pe/omit-regex "\\|single_emails")))

Ctags => Etags

Emacs use a tags file format with a syntax that is different from the “default” ctags called “etags”. Generating etags is easy since Exuberant-Ctags already know how to generate them (just add a -e switch). Emacs distributions usually came with an etags binary (I’m using ctags because there is a patched version with support for the D language but Emacs’s etag binary doesn’t support it). Once generated Emacs will ask you where the tags file is the first time you use any tag command (like find-tag or evil-jump-to-tag to jump to the specified tag) and once loaded it will remember it (at least for the current session, I still need to find how to make it remember the path between sessions).

I’ve defined this create-tags function on my .emacs to regenerate the tags files (it will ask for a directory and then use that directory as root from where to scan and place to store the tags file):

;; etags
(cond ((eq system-type 'windows-nt)
        (setq path-to-ctags "C:/installs/gnuglobal/bin/ctags.exe")))
            (cond ((eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
                    (setq path-to-ctags "/usr/local/bin/ctags")))

(defun create-tags (dir-name)
“Create tags file."
(interactive “DDirectory: “)
;; (message
;;  (format “%s -f %s/tags -eR %s”
path-to-ctags (directory-file-name dir-name) (directory-file-name
dir-name)))
(shell-command
(format "%s -f %s/tags -eR %s” path-to-ctags
(directory-file-name dir-name) (directory-file-name dir-name)))
)

With third party packages there is also support for normal ctags files and GNU Global, but I find the etags support more than convenient for my needs

Spell checking

No need to install anything if you have ispell on your system, just do: :ispell-buffer to start a spell check of the current buffer (alternatives are show above and shortcuts below) and :ispell-change-dictionary to use another dictionary (to check another language). If you prefer spell checking on the fly with underlines under misspelled words use :flyspell-mode and to see alternatives to a misspelled word press M-$ (Alt-$ on most PCs) with the cursor over the word.

Relative line numbers

Install the package “relative-line-numbers” and enable it globally on your config file with:

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'relative-line-numbers-mode t)
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'line-number-mode t)
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'column-number-mode t)

Easymotion => Evil Ace Jump

The functionality provided by the awesome Easymotion plugin on Vim is actually integrated by default on Evil since it incorporates a package called Ace Jump that does mostly the same. It’s less powerful than Easymotion (some jumps like backwards-only / forward-only / end-of-word and others are missing) and I prefer how Easymotion shows directly two chars when a jump is going to require them (instead of showing one and after pressing it, the other which is what Ace-Jump does) but the important modes (bidirectional jump to word and to char) that were the ones I was mostly using are provided.

Unlike Easymotion, jump to word asks for a letter, but that can be easily disabled with: (setq ace-jump-word-mode-use-query-char nil). The author makes the case that without asking for a char you’re probably entering more key presses most of the time. This is probably true, but when I want to jump to a random word inside the buffer my brain-eye connection has already identified the word but I’ve to stop and look/think for the first char, so in the end for me is actually faster to get jump shortcuts to all the words without having to provide the leading character.

I mapped the word/line/char to e/l/x with:

(evil-leader/set-key "e" 'evil-ace-jump-word-mode) ; ,e for Ace Jump (word)
(evil-leader/set-key "l" 'evil-ace-jump-line-mode) ; ,l for Ace Jump (line)
(evil-leader/set-key "x" 'evil-ace-jump-char-mode) ; ,x for Ace Jump (char)

Smooth scrolling

One annoying thing that most Vim users will find in Emacs is the jumpy scrolling. To have Emacs scroll like Vim (that is, line by line and leaving some lines before starting to scroll) the solution is to install the package smooth-scrolling and add this to your config:

(setq scroll-margin 5
scroll-conservatively 9999
scroll-step 1)

It’s not perfect because sometimes when you’re close to the start of end of the file it still jumps.

Powerline

Super-easy, just install the powerline-evil package and put this in your config:

(require 'powerline)
(powerline-evil-vim-color-theme)
(display-time-mode t)

Syntactic checking on the fly with Flycheck

One of the best Vim plugins if you’re a programmer is Syntastic that runs a syntactic check auto detecting a huge variety of linters every time you save. Emacs also have a similar package called “Flycheck”. It is even better because it runs in parallel while you work so you don’t have to wait for it to finish its checks like happens with Vim. Another related package is flycheck-pos-tip that shows errors on a tooltip (if you’re on GUI Emacs, obviously) instead of the minibuffer. My full flycheck config is:

;; flycheck
(package 'flycheck)
(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'global-flycheck-mode)

(after ‘flycheck
(setq flycheck-check-syntax-automatically '(save mode-enabled))
(setq flycheck-checkers (delq ‘emacs-lisp-checkdoc flycheck-checkers))
(setq flycheck-checkers (delq ‘html-tidy flycheck-checkers))
(setq flycheck-standard-error-navigation nil))


(global-flycheck-mode t)


;; flycheck errors on a tooltip (doesnt work on console)
(when (display-graphic-p (selected-frame))
(eval-after-load ‘flycheck
'(custom-set-variables
'(flycheck-display-errors-function #'flycheck-pos-tip-error-messages))))

j/k for browsing wrapped lines

Evil has the same problem as Vim when browsing with j/k long wrapped lines; it jumps the entire “real” line instead of the visual line. The solution is also easy:

(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "j") 'evil-next-visual-line)
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "k") 'evil-previous-visual-line)

escape… escapes things

One very annoying thing with Emacs is that when you are in the M-x buffer (the one were you call Emacs functions) you’ve to use C-g to exit it. If you use escape as most Vim users would tend to do by default you need to hit the key like a million times (it’s more like 3, but it’s extremely frustrating anyway). This code on my .emacs that I copied from davvil init.el on Github fixed it:

;; esc quits
(defun minibuffer-keyboard-quit ()
  "Abort recursive edit.
In Delete Selection mode, if the mark is active, just deactivate it;
then it takes a second \\[keyboard-quit] to abort the minibuffer."
  (interactive)
  (if (and delete-selection-mode transient-mark-mode mark-active)
      (setq deactivate-mark  t)
    (when (get-buffer "*Completions*") (delete-windows-on "*Completions*"))
    (abort-recursive-edit)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map [escape] 'keyboard-quit)
(define-key evil-visual-state-map [escape] 'keyboard-quit)
(define-key minibuffer-local-map [escape] 'minibuffer-keyboard-quit)
(define-key minibuffer-local-ns-map [escape] 'minibuffer-keyboard-quit)
(define-key minibuffer-local-completion-map [escape] 'minibuffer-keyboard-quit)
(define-key minibuffer-local-must-match-map [escape] 'minibuffer-keyboard-quit)
(define-key minibuffer-local-isearch-map [escape] 'minibuffer-keyboard-quit)
(global-set-key [escape] 'evil-exit-emacs-state)

Start maximized, please

Another minor annoyance was that Emacs (GUI) didn’t start maximized by default, but this is easy to fix:

(custom-set-variables
 '(initial-frame-alist (quote ((fullscreen . maximized))))) ;; start maximized

c-k/c-j for page down/up

One thing that surprised me considering how complete Evil is, is the lack of Vim’s Control-d/Control-u for page down/up. Probably because C-u is pretty important in Emacs (it’s the shortcut to give a numeric parameter to other commands, I think). I’ve in fact these mapped on my .vimrc to c-k/c-j (because I think they’re more consistent with Vim’s j/k movement keys) so that’s how I mapped them in Emacs:

(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-k") (lambda ()
                    (interactive)
                    (evil-scroll-up nil)))
(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-j") (lambda ()
                        (interactive)
                        (evil-scroll-down nil)))

Coding Style and spaces instead of tabs

Emacs by default do the really evil thing of using tab characters for indentation. To do the right thing and use spaces with 4 spaces per tab: (setq-default tab-width 4 indent-tabs-mode nil). Also, I prefer the “bsd” style on my code on C-like languages (C, C++, Java, D…) but with 4 spaces tabs instead of 8 so I also added: (setq-default c-basic-offset 4 c-default-style "bsd").

There is also a nice package called “dtrt-indent” that can automatically determine the indentation settings used on the file that you’re currently editting and adapt Emacs’s settings to them. It’s great when you’re editing external files not created by you or that for some reason follow different indentation rules that the ones you’ve in your config file.

(package 'dtrt-indent)
(dtrt-indent-mode 1)

Auto-indent with the Return key

By default Emacs doesn’t indent new lines until you press the TAB key. That is not good. But it can be changed easily enough to do the Vim thing, adjusting indentation on every new line automatically with:

(define-key global-map (kbd "RET") 'newline-and-indent)

Show matching paren

If you want to show the matching parenthesis, brace or bracket automatically, add this option: (show-paren-mode t). You can also install the Autopairs package to automatically add the matching parens/braces/etc after adding the opening one. I’ve mixed feelings about it because while very convenient (specially with Lisp!) it can be also very annoying when you want to surround something with parents and it adds a useless “)” after the opening one, I should use “Surround” on these cases, but half of the time I forget it. To enable autopairs put this on your config file after installing the package:

(require 'autopair)
(autopair-global-mode)

Fill column, auto line breaking and column limit mark

To visually mark the configured fill-column for the mode (like the colorcolumn option in Vim) install the package fill-column-indicator, then you’ll enable it on every mode where you want to display it with fci-mode (see below).

To configure auto line breaking when the line exceed 82 chars for text and markdown files, with fill indicator line:

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook (lambda ()
                            (turn-on-auto-fill)
                            (fci-mode)
                            (set-fill-column 82)))
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook (lambda ()
                            (turn-on-auto-fill)
                            (fci-mode)
                            (set-fill-column 82)))

To set the non-auto-line limit for Python a C-mode (and D) to 94:

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook (lambda ()
                              (fci-mode)
                              (set-fill-column 94)))
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook (lambda ()
                         (fci-mode)
                         (set-fill-column 94)))

(add-hook ’d-mode-hook (lambda ()
(fci-mode)
(set-fill-column 94)))

Silver Searcher (ag)

If you don’t know it, the Silver Searcher is like Ack but a lot faster. The “ag” package will allow you to make searches with it without leaving Emacs and show the results in a quickfix-style windows where you can select results and jump to them: M-x ag RET [search] RET [directory] RET.

Spanish keyboard remaps

I use Spanish keyboards. Yes, I know, Vim is much better with an English keyboard, but I’m 36 and have been using the Spanish layouts since I was 8, which means that my brain is too hardwired to it. But with a few remaps I made my Vim experience much better. These were - (minus sign) in normal mode as / (to search), as escape in insert mode (I want to try the kj thing) and as :. When you remap keys in Emacs you have to know the name of the function that the shortcut key will point to. Fortunately using C-h k (Control-h, release, k) will tell you the name of the function associated with the next key you press, so getting the name of the functions for these remaps is easy. The / and : remaps were easy:

(define-key evil-normal-state-map "-" 'evil-search-forward)
(define-key evil-normal-state-map " " 'evil-ex)
(define-key evil-insert-state-map " " 'evil-normal-state)

Don’t create backup files

I use version control and I’m a compulsive saver, so I don’t need backup files. I’ve these disabled on Vim and I’ve also disabled them on Emacs:

(setq make-backup-files nil)

Don’t move back the cursor one position when exiting insert mode

This is something that I hated in Vim so I had it disabled with the following lines on my .vimrc:

autocmd InsertEnter * let CursorColumnI = col('.')
autocmd CursorMovedI * let CursorColumnI = col('.')
autocmd InsertLeave * if col('.') != CursorColumnI | call cursor(0, col('.')+1) | endif

To get the same behaviour in Evil you just have to set one option:

(setq evil-move-cursor-back nil)

Remember the cursor position of files when reopening them

Pretty easy:

(setq save-place-file "~/.emacs.d/saveplace")
(setq-default save-place t)
(require 'saveplace)

Disable scroll bars

By default Emacs put a scroll bar on every window (split) which IMO is incredibly ugly. I already have the % of my position on the file in Powerline so I don’t need any scroll bars: (scroll-bar-mode -1).

“Graphical” GDB

Emacs GDB mode (enabled with M-x gdb RET binary_path) is pretty cool because it create several windows in the style of typical IDE debuggers, but that’s not enabled by default, to enable it: (setq gdb-many-windows t).

Once you’re in GDB mode with the binary loaded you can change to the source code windows (use C-x o to switch between splits or just mouse clicks, Vim-style C-w key bindings doesn’t work in gdb mode), load the source code file you want to set breakpoints on and set a break point with M-x gud-break. Then you can run the program with “run” (r) on the gdb window and once in the break point advance with next (n) or step (s). Local vars and registers are show in one window, breakpoints and the stack frame in another one.

Color Identifiers Mode and Color Delimiters

The plugin colors-identifiers-mode colorize every variable in a different color. I’ve mixed feelings about it because the code looks like a fruit salad, but it makes really easy to visually identify where variables are used. I’m using it for now. Setup is:

(package 'color-identifiers-mode)
(global-color-identifiers-mode)

Another firm step into the total fruitsalarization of your Emacs is the Rainbow Delimiters package that will color nested delimiters on a different color so you can check easily which of them are pairs without having to move the cursor over them. When you have lots of nested parenthesis this helps a lot to see the pairs without having to move the cursor over them.

(package 'rainbow-delimiters)
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'rainbow-delimiters-mode)

Diminish to clean clutter from the modeline

Diminish will remove the minor mode indicators from the mode line (or powerline). Example config:

(require 'diminish)
(diminish 'visual-line-mode)
(after 'autopair (diminish 'autopair-mode))
(after 'undo-tree (diminish 'undo-tree-mode))
(after 'auto-complete (diminish 'auto-complete-mode))
(after 'projectile (diminish 'projectile-mode))
(after 'yasnippet (diminish 'yas-minor-mode))
(after 'guide-key (diminish 'guide-key-mode))
(after 'eldoc (diminish 'eldoc-mode))
(after 'smartparens (diminish 'smartparens-mode))
(after 'company (diminish 'company-mode))
(after 'elisp-slime-nav (diminish 'elisp-slime-nav-mode))
(after 'git-gutter+ (diminish 'git-gutter+-mode))
(after 'magit (diminish 'magit-auto-revert-mode))
(after 'hs-minor-mode (diminish 'hs-minor-mode))
(after 'color-identifiers-mode (diminish 'color-identifiers-mode))

Select last yanked text

This is a pretty useful shotcut I’ve on my .vimrc that selects the last pasted (yanked) text:

nnoremap <leader>V `[v`]

Thanks to the comment by delexi I know that the function in Emacs is called exchange-point-and-markwhich defaults to C-x C-x but I’ve remapped to leader-V with:

(evil-leader/set-key "V" 'exchange-point-and-mark)
  • Powerline => Powerline-Evil
  • Emmet => emmet-mode. I mapped “m” to “emmet-expand-line” because the default C-j shortcut is already defined in Evil.
  • Surround => evil-surround (same operators)
  • Tabular.vim => M-x align-regexp RET regexp RET (with a visual selection)
  • Rename => M-x dired-jump, R to rename the file, RET to reopen.
  • jDaddy => I only really used it to prettify json objects, this can be done with the functions defined by James P..
  • Autocomplete and company mode works much like YouCompleteMe on Vim: they give an improved completion when you’re programming. I don’t know the difference between both, Company is newer, I think, but the ac-dcd package for completing the D language is for Autocomplete so that’s what I’m using.
  • Vimdiff => M-x ediff-files or ediff-buffers. Pretty similar. Press ? for help. If you use Helm (just use it) when you’re in a helm file list you can press TAB and in the actions list you can select one to marking the file for ediff; much quicker than browsing by hand to the files to compare.
  • netrw/nerdtree => M-x dired (included) or M-x dired+ (installable).

Other random thoughts about Emacs, Evil and Vim

  • Copy and paste with the system clipboard works without having to paste from the "+ or "* register. It’s still saved on those registers, but also in the default register so if you paste after copying from any other desktop program and then paste without specifying any register it will pull that register. Nice.
  • Evil doesn’t have :pu/:put (paste below current line).
  • Some windows with Evil (like :registers) use Emacs key binding of q to exit instead of Vim esc.
  • The toolbar is actually useful for a newbie like me. Check it. To use the toolbar without the mouse you’ve the F10 key binding.
  • Paralellization is very nice to have. I love to have my syntax checked without pauses, but…
  • Not everything is perfectly paralellized. For example, when the package manager is loading the information from a package on a split (and sometimes it takes its time), all the interface hangs. One nice feature of Emacs is that you can almost always cancel any long running process with Control-G.

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