After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state.
So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get.
Ironically a modern laptop is well-suited for Vim, as vi worked on primitive terminals--laptop keyboards don't have a lot of keys and they are poorly positioned. The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards.
So these days I am back to Vim and have been finding plugins to make up for the things that Emacs has that Vim doesn't. vim-dispatch is a decent replacement for M-x compile.
I had this problem a few years ago when I switched from Vim to Emacs. You could try writing your own evil-leader shortcuts for common commands + major mode commands. It initially takes a day or two to set up basic commands (like buffer switching, commands for your favourite programming language, and REPL stuff) but after that there's minimal tweaking to do.
For less commonly used commands you usually can do M-x [command-name] or just memorize a random Emacs keybinding.
In the end I thought it was 100% worth it for working in LISP dialects like Clojure, Scheme, and Common LISP. The good REPL integration and the ability to control everything makes Emacs pretty fun.
Reconfiguring OS X to substitute control for caps lock really helped me. Yes, many keyboards had them swapped physically some time ago. Here's an example of a keyboard from a Sun workstation:
So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get.
Ironically a modern laptop is well-suited for Vim, as vi worked on primitive terminals--laptop keyboards don't have a lot of keys and they are poorly positioned. The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards.
So these days I am back to Vim and have been finding plugins to make up for the things that Emacs has that Vim doesn't. vim-dispatch is a decent replacement for M-x compile.