[xiaomai]

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems:

1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.)

2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is fine but the transition just seems daunting.

[ZaneA]

I second the idea of using Prelude to start with Emacs, along with the package manager which makes the initial setup and adding modes/stuff very easy (see http://melpa.milkbox.net).

I haven't seen any lost functionality by using evil; modes that define bindings continue to work, and the usual C-x/C-c/M-x/whatever works fine with evil. There is the odd major mode that doesn't work with evil out of the box (usually if it redefines j/k) but most have no problems. You can still use most (all?) regular Emacs movement commands with evil as well.

[aoeuaue]

Prelude[1] is a great way to start with emacs. I don't have any experience with evil, though.

http://batsov.com/prelude/