Bravo man, I tried to make the switch from vim to emacs evil and failed horribly. I would eventually throw emacs into a state where it wasn't in any of the evil modes, then bash my keyboard with C-X C-C. Is it possible to use emacs+evil without knowing emacs inside and out?
Emacs with evil, without a doubt, runs so much smoother while editing large projects. The biggest point is that asynchronous operations are a lot easier to perform in emacs. You can get close to it with plugins like vim-dispatch or vimproc, but they always felt like a second class solution to me.
You get cool stuff like search/replace preview and super smooth async operations in the background (like on the fly linting with flycheck).
In the end, I'm still using vim. Unite with vimproc is "good enough" for me. For me, the only real place where async operation is a huge problem is with file search operations. Every few months I try to use emacs for a day, maybe next time it will stick :)
>> I would eventually throw emacs into a state where
>> it wasn't in any of the evil modes, then
>> bash my keyboard with C-X C-C.
I think the snippet of code in linked article in section 'Escape . . . escapes things' fixes most of the situations where you'd get stuck in a non-Evil mode in Emacs. It's a must have for me, otherwise I too got frustrated with getting stuck in Emacs minibuffer/command line and <esc> not getting me back to Evil-mode in main buffer. I also turned off the bell in Emacs, which helped psychologically.
I think the main problem is that in vim everything works like a buffer. When I browse files or any sort of search results, I can use the standard vim key bindings to navigate through or even dismiss the window.
With emacs, it seems like I have to learn the system to even use some plugins like projectile effectively.
Next time this happens try running evil-emacs-state. (Its bound to C-z ...I think that is the default binding that the evil install setup)
EDIT: just realized I posted this without saying why to do this. This command will put you into evil-mode even if the major mode doesn't start off in it for some reason. I use it all the time to navigate and search the output from package-list-packages for example.
It is possible to use Emacs + evil without knowing Emacs inside-out, but you do need some basic Emacs knowledge. If you had to do C-x C-c when entering a non-evil mode, you did not have that basic knowledge :-)
The least you should do is the tutorial that's presented on the startup screen or "M-x help-with-tutorial".
Emacs with evil, without a doubt, runs so much smoother while editing large projects. The biggest point is that asynchronous operations are a lot easier to perform in emacs. You can get close to it with plugins like vim-dispatch or vimproc, but they always felt like a second class solution to me.
You get cool stuff like search/replace preview and super smooth async operations in the background (like on the fly linting with flycheck).
In the end, I'm still using vim. Unite with vimproc is "good enough" for me. For me, the only real place where async operation is a huge problem is with file search operations. Every few months I try to use emacs for a day, maybe next time it will stick :)