With Vim, text editing feels like playing the piano. For every action, you compose a sequence of bindings and execute on it. It is really a language of editing.
Emacs feels more like blacksmithing, hammering the text into a proper shape. There's no composition, you just select the correct tools and applies it. And emacs have a lot of those tools.
I still have my meow config, but currently disabled. The kakoune model is definitely what you're looking for if your desire is to edit text with the fewest keystrokes, it's far better than vim. I think the vim model is better, though, because motion-as-selection is fundamentally exhaustive, and in vim, by the time you realize what you're going to do, you go into operator pending mode (e.g. pressing d) and the next keystroke also feels obvious, while in meow you may have to reset the selection by doing some movement.
What works best for me is no modal editing at all. Definitely requires the most keystrokes, but that's not a limiting factor for me. It just feels nice never having to think about modes or constantly pressing Esc, and instead navigating with a mixture of default Emacs keybinds and great, joyous to use packages like Avy, smartparens, tempel and combobulate. Meow's KEYPAD is also not really helpful, it does save some keystrokes but doesn't make anything easier to remember or reach for. For the commands that it is worse, it is much worse.
Ended up writing an alternative to Meow which addresses the issues I had.
It's currently in review for Melpa, see:
I used vim for 8 years and after switching to Emacs, realized that I'm the same. I was spending way more time (in vim) thinking about (to borrow another commenter's metaphor) how I was going to play the notes than what notes I was going to write.
Given how bad the defaults are, that's not a good aim
jasperry•2h ago