[canadian_voter]

Off the top of my head:

Tab doesn't work, I'll have to investigate how to make it work properly.

You mean for auto-complete? I think I had to do this under dotspacemacs/user-config:

  (define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "<C-tab>") 'hippie-expand)

Things like ":set nowrap" don't seem to work in evil-mode, I'll have to investigate how to do the same in emacs.

This worked for me, also under dotspacemacs/user-config:

  (spacemacs/toggle-truncate-lines-on)
  (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'spacemacs/toggle-visual-line-navigation-on)

Edit: Wow, sorry, answered the wrong question. The above will enable wrapping. I'll leave it up for anyone who wants it. For me, nowrap seemed to be on by default and it drove me crazy.

After 15 years of vim, it took me a few weeks before I was using Spacemacs more often, but now I only use vim for quick changes when I'm sshed into a server. Took a lot of googling and yak shaving, but so far I'm happy and getting more productive with time. Good luck with the other issues.