Funny, I just started using evil too. You might want to checkout prelude/projectile if you haven't yet. Also, less obviously for a vimmer, keychord.el. I'm able to use 'jk' for ESC, for instance. For others interested, the brief evil manual is worth peeking at: https://gitorious.org/evil/evil/blobs/raw/doc/doc/evil.pdf. Motions, text objects, and operators in theory are easy to add in elisp, which is cool. For this reason, evil seems unlike other vim 'emulators' that I'm aware of (could just be ignorance, obviously). I'm really digging evil though.