I spent this entire weekend setting up Evil mode for Emacs, in the Emacs Starter Kit package. It's been decent so far. Evil mode is surprisingly good, and I really don't think it could come any closer to vim emulation for Emacs. Took a lot of googling around to set up some basic plugins that I need - projectile for CtrlP etc. I think the only thing that I need atm is Magit integration with Evil and I'll be good to go.
What has been amazing so far is that even after using vim for almost 3 years, I'd been sort of afraid of diving deep into the config system (I made do with copy-pasting some popular vimrc files) and it was good enough, but in the short span of 2 days, I've actually gotten to know more about emacs configuration style than I ever did about vim. And I suspect it will only get better as I start to learn Emacs Lisp.
Do you happen to have some resources you can share? I've been playing with Tidal, a live-coding library and it wants me to use Emacs, and I just... can't. So any info on setting up evil-mode would be great, especially since it's fresh in your mind. I've found some resources but really don't know where to start.
I haven't dived into the details of Evil mode too much. The basic Vim motions and commands work out of the box, so for a casual vim user, it ought to be enough. I also went ahead and installed Evil-leader, so I could have the same <leader> keymaps that I have in my vim config.
A few places where I looked for small things here and there:
PS: Some of the configuration needs to be set up before you activate certain modes - which is often implicit in plugins, so watch out for that. Eg: To emulate C-u behavior, the functions had to be put ahead of the (require 'evil) call in evil-leader.el
I'm using stock evil mode with tidal on emacs. It's pretty good, but occasionally I'll open up a weird window. I used emacs in the late 90s, so I'm not completely afraid of it. I recommend that you shouldn't be either. You can use v to select sections and then just C-c C-c to run them. Nothing crazy. Navigate around with standard vim keystrokes, including the windows.
For that matter, getting SLIME w/ vim to work w/ Tidal wouldn't be the hardest thing. It's just that no one has tried.
Biggest problem for me when I first used evil was learning that C-g is what I need to press when I accidentally hit an emacs chord sequence and want to abort. I had to google a few times to find that out when Esc wouldn't get me out of the minibuffer.
What has been amazing so far is that even after using vim for almost 3 years, I'd been sort of afraid of diving deep into the config system (I made do with copy-pasting some popular vimrc files) and it was good enough, but in the short span of 2 days, I've actually gotten to know more about emacs configuration style than I ever did about vim. And I suspect it will only get better as I start to learn Emacs Lisp.