While Evil mode is good, it is not true vim. That could be one particularly strong reason. There is also performance, emacs is slower than vim, unless you set up an emacs daemon at startup.

Can you verbalize what significant thing you're missing from Evil that's present in vim?

As a vim user of 25 years before switching to Emacs+Evil, I can name only about two things.[1][2] And they're not nearly enough for me to go back to vim for.

[1] - vim's \zs regex pattern, which would let me position the cursor ahead of where the regex match would normally take me without it. This can be very useful for certain macros, but I don't encounter an absolute need for it very often.. but when I do, I wish this was possible in Emacs.

[2] - In my experience, vim has been much more performant on large files with long lines.. but, again, I don't edit such files often enough to make me want to back to vim... and, anyway, when relatively rare cases when I do need it I can fire up vim for that one use.

Another minor nit: 'g$' doesn't work properly.

Still nothing major, though.

I keep trying to use and learn emacs. It'll happen eventually.

Doom emacs is really fast on booting! And you have to open it only once, rest of work you do through emacsclient. I like how fast doom emacs is that sometimes I do unthinkable - I close emacs - just to restart it again.

I'm in the process of converting to emacs after about 6 years of vim - I find just having a daemon launch at startup and always having a frame open is fine once you get into the mindset of sending whatever you're editing to that frame instead of just editing it in the session you're in. I actually kind of prefer it now because when I used vim I never really took advantage of multiple buffers. I'd just open, edit and close.

One thing that's eluded me howver is being able to have graphical and terminal emacs work with the same daemon.

`emacsclient -nw` in the terminal will open a terminal emacs that works with the same daemon.

You, sir, have made my day. Doom in the terminal makes life worth living. I've been using vim for several years and am loathe to leave the terminal so this is useful. Very.

daemon only helps with startup, it does not solve the runtime-bootlenecks. Though, there are settings to minimize those, and other soltions in progrewss which might hit emacs-master in some years.

I feel pretty confident with Vim. I tried learning Emacs, got the basic file editing skills, but abandoned the attempt to configure it for my needs.

But when I tried Spacemacs it was just too much. It was completely overwhelming, I didn't understand where anything was, some key-strokes worked like Vim, some worked like Emacs, menus and commands and status lines appeared and disappeared almost at random and in the end I just gave up trying to understand this Rude Goldberg device.

Now, this doesn't mean that Spacemacs is bad - it's entirely plausible that I'm just not to bright and don't have a good attention span to learn this tool. But I don't think that I'm the only one.

Emacs has problems of it's own which vim often does not have. Sometimes those are even quite serious. And evil is far from being perfect itself and still somewhat alien in emacs-space. So staying with vim and just enriching it is also a good solution when you don't wanna buy into a new platform.

Much better performance for one. Not having to use Emacs bloat if all you want is vim features + plugins, for the other.

It’s cute to define emacs as bloat in the age of electron and chrome.

I recommend you try the experimental native elisp compilation. Really improved performance for me.

Give up org-mode and magit?

Spacemacs feels really really brittle. Probably not for people familiar with Emacs, but for vim users it (usually) does. I am imagining that this package might feel smoother for a vim user to maintain since it's vim-native

:ve=all

Cursor in virtual space... Emacs doesn't do it right.

evil is not vim. some features are missing.