Extensible Vi Layer for Emacs. not Halloween-evil ☺
"Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a good text editor"
—Anon
In the great vi vs. Emacs holy wars, there are no winners. Dedication to one's text editor of choice is often total, the hill many coders and sysadmins are willing to die on. One is either a vim user or Emacs fan. No quarter is asked or given, and yet there are occasionally compromises, win-win positions; EMacs' evil mode is one such. It is, at its simplest, a way of incorporating vi's navigation and editing features into Emacs. It's often said that using vi/vim is like learning a new language, and if one can get that into one's head, vim becomes easier to use and even master. Evil mode is an atttempt to offer the user the best of both worlds, the admittedly powerful features of Emacs (like org mode) with the editing grammar of vim.
Even though I am not a user of EMacs, I understand its power as a platform for applications like org mode (which as its name suggests is a way of organising and displaying information). But it's editor interface is a nightmare:
besides, emacs users are ripped; you wouldn't want to mess with one; the sheer strength of their fingers from reaching
across their keyboard to use obscure keybindings can crush bones
In any case, the few converts I know who move to Emacs from vi and vi-based editors do so only because their beloved and familiar vi navigation is available using this plug-in.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
252