rune-emacs-config VS lambda-emacs

I made a concerted effort not to use evil or try to ape all the Doom keybindings like I did with my previous attempt.

I can also vouch for corfu and friends (Marginalia, Orderless, Vertico, Embark, Consult); the philosophy behind the way they're written is appealing and setting them up / extending them is pretty trivial. Embark and Consult are particularly great. [Relevant corfu config] [Relevant MOVEC config]

you can try to reorganize things by making modules out of parts of your config. There is a drawback to this: slower init time. Check this out to see how easily you can do it with the help of use-package

This isn't really complete but if you want to take a quick look at how you can easily set up evil and have all your 5DD and ZZ back without any pain, try looking at it. https://github.com/skyler544/rune-emacs-config

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.