Evil Editingλ︎

Evil provides vim-style multiple editing states, greatly increasing key binding reuse and minimising the need for simultaneous key presses.

Doom Emacs provides Evil editing states

normal - for manipulating and navigating existing text (default state)
insert - for writing new text
visual - for selecting blocks of text

Normal state by default

Evil normal state should be used most of the time, unless writing lots of new code or text.

Normal stateλ︎

j,k,h,l to navigate text, use with Ctrl to navigate menus, with Space w to navigate windows

Insert stateλ︎

Insert new text (or Del), e.g. when writing new code or documentation

The most common keys to enter insert mode from normal mode are:

i to insert before the cursor, a to append after the cursor

o to insert an new line below the cursor, O to insert a new line after the cursor

f d or Esc to leave insert mode and return to normal mode.

Visual stateλ︎

Select characters, words, lines and regions with visual select. The background changes color to visually indicate which text is selected

v to visually select a region and run commands on the text in that region. Selection can be done with the navigation keys or motions objects such as word w and locations such as end of line $.

Shift+v to visually select by line. v g g to select from current position to top of file, v G to select from current point to end of file.

Ctrl+v to select a region using the hjkl navigation keys, e.g. to select table data.

g c on a selected region will add comment characters to the start of each line in the region

v ~ toggles the case of the selected text (upper/lower case)

o to toggle between the left and right side of selection

Evil surroundλ︎

S to surround the current character with the given character, i.e. ++double-quotes++

v S followed by a character will surrond the visually selected text with that character.

Learn Vim-style editingλ︎

Vim-style editing is arguably the most effective way to work with text, supporting changes as much through text manipulation as editing text. Once practised, vim-style editing is far faster than uni-mode editing.

The recommended way to learn vim style editing is to practice and ideally use it for everything you do.

Space h T v starts the build in Vim tutorial. This provides the basic movement of vim and provides an interactive way to practice your skills

To help make Vim style editing become a sub-conscious act you should learn to speak Evil

Vim Adventures is a web-based game that is an alternative to practising Vim.