I understand that the comment above doesn't answer your actual question. I deliberately decided to split my answer into two parts - first about learning Emacs. Now, let's talk about Vim, etc. Vim navigation is amazing, fantastic, and a highly practical model. As someone well-versed in both vanilla Emacs and vim-style, I highly recommend not abandoning it in favor of Emacs' built-in way. Yes, it is beneficial to learn Emacs native keybindings because they are ubiquitous - on Mac and Terminal, readline, etc. Some Emacs key-combinations are nicer than Evil's, but in practical sense, overall, they are inferior to vim-style navigation.
The biggest pain about Vim navigation is that there's no "true vimming" outside of Vim and Neovim. Every single editor that tries to simulate it to a fuller extent has repeatedly failed. Every single Vim plugin for VSCode, IdeaVim plugin for IntelliJ, Sublime plugins, etc., they all have glaring deficiencies compared to the actual Neovim experience. With only one exception - Emacs. In fact, Emacs can and does vim better than Neovim.
Do try Doom Emacs or Spacemacs, at least for a while. Once you grasp the mechanics of stitching different packages together, learn hooks and advising, fearlessly start redefining the keybindings, maybe then you can decide to build your config. But maybe Doom will provide everything you need. Give it a try, it is really good.
Thanks for the very thorough response(s)… now, a question, what’s the most basic and minimal bootstrap config of emacs (possibly within Doom) that sets a relative lisp-newbie up to effectively work with elisp inside emacs?
I’ve used lisps, I’ve never used lisp REPLs, and while I hear the beauty of emacs is getting to the point where it’s your terminal and your IDE, it’s non-obvious how to get up to running like that even in its own language.
The biggest pain about Vim navigation is that there's no "true vimming" outside of Vim and Neovim. Every single editor that tries to simulate it to a fuller extent has repeatedly failed. Every single Vim plugin for VSCode, IdeaVim plugin for IntelliJ, Sublime plugins, etc., they all have glaring deficiencies compared to the actual Neovim experience. With only one exception - Emacs. In fact, Emacs can and does vim better than Neovim.
Do try Doom Emacs or Spacemacs, at least for a while. Once you grasp the mechanics of stitching different packages together, learn hooks and advising, fearlessly start redefining the keybindings, maybe then you can decide to build your config. But maybe Doom will provide everything you need. Give it a try, it is really good.