Evil is not just great. It's the only "true" vim layer outside of vim/nvim worth commending. Gary Bernhardt once said: "there's no such thing as vim mode", in the sense that every single attempt to emulate vim outside of vim/nvim is a bleak imitation. None of them - not a single VSCode vim plugin, not Sublime's, not IdeaVim in IntelliJ, no browser extensions are without some glaring omissions. While Evil+evil plugins in Emacs are not just 'close' - they are better than the source of inspiration. Gary just probably didn't know that.