The idea behind evil mode in emacs is to not use the control or meta keys for most things, since they are awkwardly placed. Evil mode activates the Esc key just

The idea behind evil mode in emacs is to not use the control or meta keys for most things, since they are awkwardly placed. Evil mode activates the Esc key just like in vim. evil-escape module for evil mode adds the 'fd' functionality discussed here.