Escaping evil-mode

I've been using evil-mode for almost 4 years at this point, and Vim keybinds even longer. However, I think it's almost time for me to change. In 2022 I spent the later half of the year just on default, vanilla emacs keybinds. This was really enjoyable and let me learn more about how the puritans do Emacs, but in general, I just felt a lot slower. So I came back to evil-mode, and have been using it daily ever since. But with some recent annoyances in Evil, and having to almost double my config size to use Evil integrations with other packages, I've been thinking of using Vanilla again, or exploring some of the other modal plugins like: meow, Xah-Fly-Keys, or god-mode (don't love the name of this one :P). So, to the disdain of my productivity, I am going to try to use each of these for a week at a time, and report back each week with an update.

The test

I will be comparing each mode on the following all scored out of 10:

• Learnability. How long does it take for a seasoned Vim and Emacs user to learn?
• Feel. How ergonomic, and how fast does it "feel"? This is fairly subjective but it does matter to me. I like to feel like i'm hacking on a 80's mainframe, with a nuclear threat on the horizon.
• Config. How difficult is it to configure, and get working with other packages

evil-mode's rating

Here is my review of evil-mode:

• Learnability: 10 it's just Vim's keybinds (mostly)
• Feel: 7 it does feel fast, and fairly ergonomic, but the use of escape to escape modes kind of sucks
• Config: 3 you have to install extra packages for almost everything you could think of to add evil support

Overall I do like evil-mode, and i'm very productive with it, but I find that a lot of little issues pop-up on a day to day basis that could be ironed out. Things like not having re-do automatically working. At the end of the day I use Emacs for both, speed, but also, for extensability, something that I think evil-mode restricts.