I use org mode, and thought it would be a gentle way of establishing some familiarity with emacs. But whenever I want to do anything other than the slightest edits to my todo files I open the file in vim! Emacs just has no built in functionality, everything has to be implemented. It's like raising a baby - teach it eat, drink, crawl. Eventually it will be somewhat capable, but then I can't simply fire it up on another machine. Maybe I'm missing something, but every time I look up the simplest edit, I'm presented with 30 lines of code. Maybe the gentle approach is not the way to get going with emacs. Anyway, point being I'm also looking for a vim alternative.
> Emacs just has no built in functionality, everything has to be implemented. It's like raising a baby - teach it eat, drink, crawl.
Sorry if I seem negative but it looks like you only scratched the surface of a vanilla Emacs install and gave up shortly afterwards.
Most functionality in Emacs comes in 3rd-party packages. Configuring Emacs is for the most part an integration job (and if you're using Prelude or Spacemacs, this is all done for you by the community.)
I do agree Emacs can be daunting at first, its a vast ecosystem on top of an alien VM, but learning it is well worth the time spent!
How about Spacemacs? It has Vim bindings (by default), comes with a very reasonable set of plugins for generic tasks, and has bundles available for most languages.
Emacs is definitely more of a platform you can build your own editor on, choose whichever parts you like and then you get an editor perfect for your needs.
Vim is more of an integrated "this is what you get and it's this way or the highway" sort of deal. Of course there's some extensibility but nowhere near to the same degree.
