Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It emulates the main features of Vim, and provides facilities for writing custom extensions. Also see our page on EmacsWiki.

See the official documentation for installation instructions. We recommend using package.el.

As a quickstart, you can add the following code to your Emacs init file.

;; Set up package.el to work with MELPA
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
(package-initialize)
(package-refresh-contents)

;; Download Evil
(unless (package-installed-p 'evil)
  (package-install 'evil))

;; Enable Evil
(require 'evil)
(evil-mode 1)

• Evil requires Emacs 24.1 or later.

• Evil requires any of the following for C-r:

  • undo-redo from Emacs 28
  • The undo-tree package (available via GNU ELPA)
  • The undo-fu package (available via MELPA and NonGNU ELPA)

• For the motions g; g, and for the last-change-register ., Evil requires the goto-chg.el package (available via MELPA and NonGNU ELPA), which provides the functions goto-last-change and goto-last-change-reverse.

• For Emacs 24.1 and 24.2 Evil also requires cl-lib.

The latest version of the documentation is readable online here. It is also available as PDF and as EPUB.

Evil is discussed at the gmane.emacs.vim-emulation mailing list.

Visit us on irc.libera.chat #evil-mode.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines for issues and pull requests.