Comment by kqr

I know this is the joke, and I know Evil is the jokey reply, but ... both sides of the joke carry a grain of truth, as good jokes do.

I know a lot of people become comfortable with the default editing tools in Emacs, and many of them are good, but on the whole, vanilla Emacs does not ship with a great editor.

The Vim family makes up amazingly well designed editors.

Evil is a Vim implementation in Emacs. It is the best of both worlds, and not just on paper. It actually works.