Here's an Evil-mode best practices thread on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8483182/evil-mode-best-pr...

I found at least the mini-buffer quit addition to be a practical necessity; without it I would fairly frequently get stuck in Emacs minibuffer (i.e., its command line) even after I pressed escape. ctrl-G would get me out,but it's much nicer to have the fix so <esc> will (almost?) always get out off command line and back to normal mode.

It's also worth learning how to map keys in Evil, so you can add mappings as you desire. It's easy.

Org-mode is for me the big attraction when moving from Vim to Emacs, and to give it Vim-like usability you really need to do a lot of remapping of Org functions (i.e., create Evil-mode map for Org functions), otherwise you'll be doing lots of chord-keying. There really should be some kind of small open source project that does this; I've been meaning to do it myself for a while. . . .

Here's a quick screencast of my evil-mode setup from a vim user's perspective with a link to my emacs config in the description. It won't change your life, but it really does give you the best of both worlds. I don't feel like I'm using a different editor than vim. I'm blown away by how thorough the vim emulation is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wAeFiGv_yE