Evil: The exact amount of vim in emacs (but no more than that)

I love emacs, but I also love modal editing.  Evil was (and vimpulse before that), was a great finding.

What I want is to have a normal mode where most commands feel like vim, and an insert mode where most commands feel like emacs, so c-p would do previous-line in insert mode instead of autocomplete word. Here are some of my tricks (many of them gathered from other people's configs)

99% emacs insert mode

Although using lots of insert mode commands when I was using vim daily, now I hardly find the necessity for them.

(setcdr evil-insert-state-map nil)
(define-key evil-insert-state-map [escape] 'evil-normal-state)

And that's it. with this, you're mostly done. In insert mode, every key but escape will behave as in plain emacs.

Undo-tree? nah (99% of vim in normal mode)

I still prefer emacs' undo-redo schema than the undo-tree. In the docs (also in the code), evil states that undo-tree will be used if available, and regular undo-redo will be used in case it's not there. That sounds fine, but if you get evil from elpa, undo-tree will be downloaded and installed without asking.Uninstalling undo-tree afterwards is not an enough because when loading, evil will complain it has some unmet dependency.

To make evil forget about it I edited the evil-pkg.el in my ~/.emacs.d/elpa/evil-xxxxxxx/ dir deleting undo-tree as a requirementand leaving it like this:

(define-package "evil" "20140109.605" "Extensible Vi layer for Emacs." '((goto-chg "1.6")))

c-r tries to redo

Just remap the desired key in the chosen mode to your prefered function.

(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "C-r") 'isearch-backward) 

With these few tricks you can hack further to fine tune your keybindings and submodes inside evil. If you dig deeper into its code, you'll see it's quite well organized and quite clear.