I use it for the same reason I use bash history--to view, edit, and reuse ex commands. I'm not surprised that there is a way to customize evil to get to something similar, but my point was that it doesn't work out of the box the way vim does. I've no doubt that it could be implemented, and could file an issue as you suggest, but as someone who uses vim as my daily driver all I can say is every time I fire up evil I run into something like that which immediately turns me off. I guess I just don't have enough appetite for customizing my editor to take up emacs. Just noticed that :h doesn't open the vim help (of course, why should it, this is emacs), but there again, something I use several times a day. I could go on. A big reason I haven't tried harder is that there is no easy path to converting an existing .vimrc to elisp, and over the years I've spent enough time configuring vim to work just the way I want.