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Is there a convenient way to make e.g. M-x followed by backspace exit the minibuffer -- similar to how colon (evil-ex) followed by backspace behaves? (I'm learning Emacs and Evil at the same time ...)

Try with C-g (CTRL+g)[1]. C-g is also considered a proper way to abort almost any running/typed command.

Thank you, I did discover C-g -- I also bound [escape] to the same thing (as follows) because of my existing habits:

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(define-key minibuffer-local-must-match-map [escape] 'abort-recursive-edit)

No good. ESC is handy sometimes as a sticky meta. The best example is when you want to type ‘M-x keyboard-escape-quit’ — the exit command that is stronger than C-g (keyboard-quit). Out of a box it’s on triple escape (ESC ESC ESC), you could type ‘M-ESC ESC’ instead, of course, but this is less convenient. It is possible, by the way, to map it to double ESC without side-effects (almost), even globally: | (define-key global-map (kbd "ESC ESC") #'keyboard-escape-quit)

However I notice that I reflexively use backspace to exit the minibuffer -- rather than unlearn, I'd like to teach Emacs to obey ... Is there a convenient way?

No idea, whether this qualify as a convenient way, but I cannot see a problem: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (defun minibuffer-delete-backward-char-or-keyboard-quit (n &optional killflag) (interactive "p\nP") (if (= (point) (minibuffer-prompt-end)) (minibuffer-keyboard-quit) (delete-backward-char n killflag))) (define-key minibuffer-local-map (kbd "DEL") #'minibuffer-delete-backward-char-or-keyboard-quit) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- This acts as quit whenever you are DEL’ing through the left boundary, not only when the minibuffer is empty, so e. g. ‘M-x M-p DEL’ is also quit. If you don’t like this, change (point) to (point-max).