aiern 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 aiern
(unless (package-installed-p 'aiern)
  (package-install 'aiern))

;; Enable aiern
(require 'aiern)
(aiern-mode 1)

• aiern requires Emacs 24.1 or later.

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

  • undo-redo from Emacs 28
  • The undo-tree package
  • The undo-fu package

• For the motions g; g, and for the last-change-register ., aiern requires the goto-chg.el package, which provides the functions goto-last-change and goto-last-change-reverse.

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

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

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

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

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