Spacemacs does indeed use evil.

I found Spacemacs to be great starting point for someone new to Emacs, but after a while I highly recommend extracting your workflow from Spacemacs to vanilla Emacs.

Thanks to use-package[1] (that Spacemacs also uses), most of the extracting would be just copy and pasting things from Spacemacs repo. The hardest part would be figuring out which package is responsible for which functionality. A starting point would be just put this in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

    (require 'package)
    (setq package-enable-at-startup nil)
    (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))

    (package-initialize)
    (unless (package-installed-p 'use-package)
      (package-refresh-contents)
      (package-install 'use-package))

    (eval-when-compile
      (require 'use-package))

    (use-package evil
      :ensure t
      :config
      (evil-mode t)

And now you got a working vanilla Emacs with evil auto-installed, ready to be put in VCS. After extracting work is done, it will open up a new world of customization (even a low-level things such as replacing package.el with straight.el[2] to enjoy configuration reproducibility) as you now know exactly how every piece fits together. :-)

[1]: https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

[2]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el