I don’t understand your backspace problem. In all of the following cases, Vim 7.3 and Emacs 24 with Evil act the same:
In Command-line mode (by typing `:`), when there is text after ‘:’ and before the cursor, typing Backspace deletes one character behind the cursor. In Command-line mode, if there is no text left but ‘:’, it exits Command-line mode, changing to Normal mode. Emacs displays Quit in this case, while Vim just exits silently. If I press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor in the middle of a line, the cursor moves back one character as if you pressed `h`.
I did just notice an inconsistency with Backspace, but it doesn’t sound like what you’re talking about: if you press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor is at the leftmost column, the cursor wraps to the previous line in Vim, but stays in the same place in Emacs. The cause of that behavior in Vim is the 'whichwrap' option’s value containing “b”. Evil has a rough equivalent to that option in evil-cross-lines (a boolean), but I don’t know if it has an equivalent that lets you selectively enable wrapping only for Backspace and Space. https://bitbucket.org/lyro/evil/issue/247/evil-invert-char-s... implies that there was no exact equivalent as of Febraury 2013.
In Command-line mode (by typing `:`), when there is text after ‘:’ and before the cursor, typing Backspace deletes one character behind the cursor. In Command-line mode, if there is no text left but ‘:’, it exits Command-line mode, changing to Normal mode. Emacs displays Quit in this case, while Vim just exits silently. If I press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor in the middle of a line, the cursor moves back one character as if you pressed `h`.
My full Evil config is here: https://github.com/roryokane/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L12.... But I don’t see anything in it that would change the behavior of Backspace.
I did just notice an inconsistency with Backspace, but it doesn’t sound like what you’re talking about: if you press Backspace in Normal mode while the cursor is at the leftmost column, the cursor wraps to the previous line in Vim, but stays in the same place in Emacs. The cause of that behavior in Vim is the 'whichwrap' option’s value containing “b”. Evil has a rough equivalent to that option in evil-cross-lines (a boolean), but I don’t know if it has an equivalent that lets you selectively enable wrapping only for Backspace and Space. https://bitbucket.org/lyro/evil/issue/247/evil-invert-char-s... implies that there was no exact equivalent as of Febraury 2013.