I started on vim. Switched to emacs for a couple years, then switched back.

The biggest issue with emacs for me is ergonomic. It relies way too much on the pinkie finger for everything and it gets really painful when you get RSI in your pinkie. It’s fine if you’re going slow and taking your time with things, but then why learn a complicated editor in the first place if you’re just going to go slow?

Yes, I tried evil mode for a while as well. The problem with that is that it’s, well, evil. An unholy alliance of drastically different paradigms, the setup just becomes way too complicated. You lose the main advantage of emacs modelessness and are back to switching modes like vim, only now you also have all of the emacs key bindings to deal with. Why not just go back to vim and simplify your life? That’s what I did!

Well, if your pinky is such an issue why not bind „C-“ to caps lock instead? I‘ve heard many people doing that and be happy w/o the effort of learning the evil mode framework (which I wouldn’t suggest beginners doing despite many prominent Emacs evangelists using evil).

It's really easy to use a different key for that. Pretty sure the keyboards it was written for had a different layout to today's off the shelf ones.

I have swapped "C-" key with "~". I can type all the "C-key" shortcuts with flat hand and it just feels right(at least to me).

I still mostly use vim but when I use emacs I prefer plugins like meowmode or godmode which essentially make the modifiers sticky so you dont need to chord.