I feel like it’s pretty safe to say https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs mostly solves of these concerns for Vim users in 2020. If you really can’t spend any time learning a few help keys then I guess I can’t recommend anything, but you’re here commenting so I bet you have some time :).
Seriously, check out Doom, whether you use neovim, Emacs, VS Code, or nano (Doom has quite good Emacs and CUA bindings as well). It’s brilliant to the point where I’d describe it as Emacs with sane defaults. I guess it probably can’t match the more niche IDE features but LSP and friends are bridging most of the gaps.
You can finally safely ignore claims that beginners should roll their own emacs configs thanks to Doom. That strategy is good for learning if you’re used to diving into unfamiliar systems but you can learn just as much by starting with Doom and working your way inward anyway. The community is great, just like the larger emacs community.
I can’t stress Doom enough; it gets better often not by the day but by the hour. Henrik is a machine.
I use both doom emacs and neovim, and I'd say: not really, at least not for me, there are some Vim features evil doesn't emulate properly, or at least it doesn't work like in Vim. Off the top of my head, I write in many languages, but absolutely hate the US international keyboard for accented characters, guess what? Vim has built-in support for digraph[0] by using Ctrl-k and iirc this is a motion keyboard shortcut in emacs, and since I like and use org-mode a lot, I'm always frustrated when I have to type in another language. Another one was with the various Terminal emulators packages in emacs, although this one was solved recently[1], whereas in (neo)vim it works flawlessly ootb.
I have the same language issue. Emacs has a native version of this feature[0] that works great in Doom. TeX mode, where you enter a backslash before the accent (c \ , => ç) is most like C-k in that it requires an explicit keypress. I usually just use one of the language-specific modes because you can then fluidly type diacritics (with modes for prefix or postfix entry) and manually rewrite c, or e’ on the rare occasions such conflicts come up.
Thanks for pointing this out, seems the "bug" is exclusively with org-mode, which is too bad because I don't usually need this feature outside of org-mode.
I would say the Emacs user mindshare has shifted somewhat to Doom. There are a lot of Doom fans on r/emacs now, and the Discord is huge compared to what it was. Many new contributors are cropping up. Even some developers of well-known packages, like org-roam, have switched to Doom. Take it from him, not me! https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/migrating_to_doom_emacs/
Compared to Spacemacs, which has complex abstraction layers over Emacs, Doom seems to be much lighter. It's easy to get into Emacs browsing Doom's modules. Plus, the BDFL model is serving Doom quite well since Henrik is a god-tier BDFL. He's constantly active and keeps Doom very focused on performance with sensible defaults and consistent programming style. Docs are a focus and are growing, and they're extremely comfortable to browse in Doom Emacs itself, as well as the Doom and Emacs source code of course.
None of this is meant to attack Spacemacs, it did and does much for Emacs, and many swear by it. But I would say Doom is better these days.
Yeah, I was aware of that but the way I wrote it was ambiguous, sorry. I meant “even some people who have the chops to maintain complex custom configs are switching to Doom”.
Seriously, check out Doom, whether you use neovim, Emacs, VS Code, or nano (Doom has quite good Emacs and CUA bindings as well). It’s brilliant to the point where I’d describe it as Emacs with sane defaults. I guess it probably can’t match the more niche IDE features but LSP and friends are bridging most of the gaps.
You can finally safely ignore claims that beginners should roll their own emacs configs thanks to Doom. That strategy is good for learning if you’re used to diving into unfamiliar systems but you can learn just as much by starting with Doom and working your way inward anyway. The community is great, just like the larger emacs community.
I can’t stress Doom enough; it gets better often not by the day but by the hour. Henrik is a machine.