I'd definitely recommend Spacemacs. It's a starter pack for Emacs which adds layers (it's like a collection of modes), mnemonic key bindings, and other things.
For anyone unsure if they would like spacemacs from the "Vi" camp, consider spacemacs as a super-set of Vi but now imagine that you have modal-control in "normal" mode of quite a large bit of user-interface and applications without degrading to an Ex-style "command line" (where you type commands for changing editor state like ':set number' or ':set nonumber')---since spacemacs displays the available keys with help at each level, you won't have to leave the editor to "lookup" a command, typing the commands is one and the same. Just considering this I learned that there is a SPC t "layer" (layer is spacemacs terminology for a configuration between the keyboard and some feature) for toggling numbering, whitespace, syntax checking and indentation guides.
Using spacemacs in day-to-day use is much easier for newcomers than learning Vim or Emacs alone. If you assumed just three keys (0-9A-Za-z) after the leader (SPC) you can navigate over 195K commands. In practice spacemacs is navigating more than that with symbols like quotes, brackets, commas and so on.
Using spacemacs in day-to-day use is much easier for newcomers than learning Vim or Emacs alone. If you assumed just three keys (0-9A-Za-z) after the leader (SPC) you can navigate over 195K commands. In practice spacemacs is navigating more than that with symbols like quotes, brackets, commas and so on.