castlemacs VS evil-collection

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs but it wasn't good since it's not actually Emacs - you need to learn entirely new stuff on top of Emacs stuff. In the end I gave up and settled with IntelliJ IDEA for Scala development. In five years I returned to Emacs, but started from very simple Castlemacs distribution, learning the meaning of each line, copying to my config only settings I needed, mostly related to configuring Emacs to behave properly on macOS. I don't bother with Doom Emacs, my startup time of 3 seconds doesn't bother me.

I started from this https://github.com/freetonik/castlemacs, it's not been updated for a few years, but a good starting point if you're on macOS.

https://github.com/freetonik/castlemacs is the approach where I finally understood and was the missing tutorial for mac users. I've done the emacs embedded tutorial, but got stuck at that weird usage of ESC key as Meta key. That repo laid down the bridgework to me being comfortable with emacs. Still very sparse, but getting there!

Lower the barrier to entry, maybe give them your configuration or some sort of starter-kit, I think castlemacs is good choice as it is quite simple and useable. Tell them to fork it on Github and use it.

I think IJKL keys are probably better then arrow keys, see how castlemacs does it.

It looks like that package has an issue tracker here, if you wanted to raise one: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection/issues

Honestly, I've yet to find a plugin that I use that isn't covered by https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection. I love emacs, but I can't stand the chords.

Evil and Evil Collection is the nuclear option.

I still have phases where I experiment with modal editing, but I haven't messed with Evil-mode in a long time. I prefer Meow, in part because it doesn't invest everything on a single command layout. And the sample Dvorak layout meshes really well with Emacs bindings for special modes (like Dired and Ibuffer). So you don't have to install and configure something like Evil-collection just to use the same bindings everywhere.

The problem I have with evil in Emacs is that it is another layer on top of vinalla Emacs. Not many packages are designed with evil key bindings in mind. You need packages like https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection and and https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-magit and https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-ediff to make Emacs feel more "evil". Distros like Doom and Spacemacs integrate these packages for you, but then you're even farther away from the default Emacs experience. I also find online help worse for evil bindings. To figure stuff out you often have to resort to looking at vim or neovim documentation. "Vanilla" Emacs is famously "self documenting" but last I checked evil couldn't provide useful help, within Emacs, in the same way.

Evil does interfere with bindings in some modes, but https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection fixes a lot of these issues, both for built-in modes and a lot of popular third-party ones.

Oh, and stick this in your use-package for general: ;; We want SPC as a leader key, probably. So do this. It just affects what ;; keybinds are overridden by the `override' keymap functionality that ;; `general' provides. ;; ;; https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection#making-spc-work-similarly-to-spacemacs ;; ;; NOTE: `evil-collection' binds over SPC in many packages. To use SPC as a ;; leader key with `general', first set these override states: (setq general-override-states '(insert emacs hybrid normal visual motion operator replace))

You might want to look into the evil-collection package.

Evil mode is incredible, but it has real disadvantages in the Emacs context. It is another layer above Emacs, which makes Emacs different from its default self. E.g. most packages don't come with evil-mode key bindings. The popular Emacs packages are handled by https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection but, there is always going to be a layer of translation between how upstream describes its key bindings and how Evil binds them.