What made a difference for me was figuring out the right keybindings. The default keybindings in emacs weren’t very ergonomic and so I came up with a more convenient set of keybindings (for evil-mode, since I prefer vim-style editing). They follow a nice pattern on the keyboard and made a huge difference.

I eventually adapted them so I could have relatively consistent keybindings across vim/emacs/VSCode/IntelliJ and the results are here:

https://github.com/fiddlerwoaroof/dotfiles/blob/b13240a42fa4...

If you understand the elisp keybinding notation, it’s possible to use the C-, ones in VSCode.