Lukas Lazarek has a very interesting post that details how he implemented his own evil-like mode for Emacs. Lazarek begins by describing the difference between Emacs and Vim. His distinction is much like mine: Vim wants to be a lightweight, fast editor and nothing else, while Emacs wants to be a text-based programming environment. I usually express that as Emacs being a lightweight Lisp machine but the meaning is pretty much the same.
Lazarek says the big advantage of Vim is its modal editing. I like modal editing but I see it as more something you’re used to rather than an actual advantage (unless we’re talking about RSI, which Lazarek does appear to be) but I don’t see it as an advantage. For me, the real advantage of Vim is not that it’s modal but that its command set is composable. I’ve written about this before.
Regardless, Lazarek wanted to implement a modal mode but didn’t want the exact Vim experience that Evil offers. It might seem like implementing your own Evil mode would be a significant undertaking but Lazarek demonstrates how simple it is by showing a short bit of Elisp that provides an “Evil mode” that merely implements the jklh cursor movement commands. It really is amazingly simple.
He also provides a link to his full implementation. It’s longer, of course, but still pretty simple and very easy to understand. That last clause is, I think, the main takeaway. It’s really easy to customize Emacs even in ways that seem complicated and outré. As always, Emacs lets you have it your way and often fairly easily.