lambda-emacs VS evil-guide

You might look at crafted emacs and my own lambda-emacs (not sure if either of these are properly classified as "distros" though). Both default to vanilla Emacs bindings. The repo for lambda-emacs also has a bunch of links to some other great vanilla configs like Prelude, etc.

I am a professor in the humanities (philosophy) and I maintain a framework for Emacs (I don’t know if it rises to the level of “distro”) that is conducive to humanities work, including writing, notes, citations, a good ui, and basic programming. I’m happy to say more if you have any questions. https://github.com/Lambda-Emacs/lambda-emacs

See my lambda-emacs and lambda-themes. They are meant for writing and readability.

7 - Meow: Meow is great. I switched from evil a few months ago and am pretty happy with it. I also dropped general.el for bind-key.el, which is included with use-package (which I see you are using anyway). You can look at my setup of meow here and a more generic setup of keybindings here. I haven't had any trouble with using this instead of general.

2. the leader key https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide#leader-key

these are random search results that may or may not be authoritative, but they should be a good start.

Doom uses Evil-mode for vim emulation. https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide is a good guide for translating between vim concepts and Emacs.

I'm not aware of a guide specifically for non-vim users, but pretty much any vim guide will be helpful - it's just best to avoid parts on vimscript, as evil isn't configured using that. Even though it introduces itself as a guide for Vim users, I still think https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide is worth a read. As for packages which complement evil, most are named with evil as a prefix, so you can browse melpa with that in mind. One exception that comes to mind is lispyville, which provides an evil approach for editing s-expressions. evil-cleverparens is also worth a look. Feel free to ask any questions on the evil issues page too!

Evil is a complex machinery build by vim nostalgic refugees, so familiarity with Vim's modal editing model is still recommended. I like this, even if it's not a tutorial: https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide

I'd recommend reading noctuid's evil guide, particularly the link to the spacemacs keymap guide and the mention of the commentary on evil-core.el

It’s probably worth understanding what evil is doing so you can make your own key bindings for packages you find. I personally don’t think evil is obscuring things for me because I’ve gotten pretty good at using the introspection features of emacs to look at what everything is doing. The guide from noctuid was a good reference when I read it https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide.

Set aside a little bit of time to learn properly how Emacs and evil-mode work together. Not sure if you've seen it, but here's an excellent guide for transitioning from Vim to Emacs with evil-mode. It's by the author/maintainer of general.el.

A bit unrelated to your question, but if you are having trouble with keybindings I really recommend this read. Also, if you use evil-mode, reading evil-guide is really worth it as well, to understand how to configure things correctly.

This should make the porting process easier https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide