I was pretty sure when I started using Spacemacs that I'd run into enough vim-compatibility disparities to dislike the experience. I was all braced for it…then it didn't happen. There are a few issues, but they're outweighed by the other evil features, not to mention being able to use magit and org-mode.

I was just helping a junior colleague with vim-in-Atom yesterday. (I've been trying to encourage him to learn vim-style editing, and he's receptive.) But we discovered that, if vim-in-Atom does have an ex mode, it isn't accessed with :. This is the kind of detail that evil gets right.

wait what? how does that work??

: commands are a major part of vim!

:q! 😬

I’ve actually started to make a point of using vim on things that aren’t my dev machine. I want to get stronger at vim and there’s really only one way to do that

Yeah apparently they think you should use default Atom menus/shortcuts to do that. Also looks like there's another addon package that adds ex mode.

Re: getting stronger at vim-style editing, lots of vim users I know don't make adequate use of the . key. That's one of the very best features of vim, IMO.

iirc atom's ex-mode is just a separate plugin because it was in an alpha state for a long time

to be completely fair though. evil-ex does not bring complete set of commands from vim. but it brings just enough. And I'd say more than enough: https://gist.github.com/agzam/acd3b5e311f8f7e87e21b550856f65e1

I haven't seen any other Vim emulators doing better job

thanks for the guide @ag

well, it's not the guide, just a list of commands 🙂 it would be probably cool to add examples of extended use of commands, e.g, ! stylelint % --fixor others