I've put together a guide for managing keymaps in a way that allows one to use much of Emacs in Vim-like ways (ie using short key sequences near home row instead of Control-Shift-Nonsense). It has some of the things I would have liked to know when I first converted to Emacs, but now do and can communicate to the next generation of migrants from Vim. There's also a section on defining an escape key sequence. Both are in the EmacsWiki Evil article. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil