My problem with evil is that I'm still inside of Emacs and I still need to know Emacs to be useful with it. If I am keen to become an evil user, what is my path forward? I've watched videos, read "tutorials," I've tried evil, doom, spacemacs, etc. I'm always put off by the thing almost as soon as I punch `$ emacs .` into my terminal. I've got nearly 2 decades of mileage with (neo)vi(m) in my rear view mirror. I am very interested in org-mode and am willing to learn but for the life of me I can't figure out how to.

Fair enough, I haven't seen a great learning path, every question that I asked at first ended in an answer with something in emacs that I didn't know about. What the hell are helm, avy, Ivy etc? I just want to find some files.

I'm on spacemacs which I believe has given me a massive head start on a great setup. If I started from something more lightweight I would have wanted to end up where I am now, but the results on my own would have been worse.

However I admit that even the supposedly beginner friendly spacemacs still has the same problem of "find the intuitively named spacemacs layer, then start googling all the package names mentioned in the docs (which are not intuitively named), and possibly read the source", which is a big set of hurdles.

Appreciate the reply. I guess it's all perception. If I was in my 20s, I'd have the time and desire to dig into it and figure it out. Alas, I'm in my 40s and between work and family I just don't have the time for those things. Maybe when my kids are a little older...