Thank you so much for your elaborate and well-articulated reply! As I don't want these messages to spiral into an ever-expanding wall of text, I've chosen to refrain from reacting to every single valuable thing you've written. Nonetheless, everything, including the parts I'm explicitly not reacting to, has been a joy to read and has been very informative. So, again, thank you! Much appreciated!

Which alternate layout are you considering?

Hehe, currently, I've landed on Night.

I recommend grabbing something you typed and feeding it here to check heat map of keypresses you would have done to have some visual representation of your usage.

This is pretty cool! Unfortunately, (perhaps unsurprisingly) Night isn't included within its layout options. I would otherwise have loved to check this out.

switch stuff on the early signals because that first wrist pain was an eye opener on how bad things can get if you ignore them.

Would you like to elaborate on this? As the pains and discomfort have increased over time, I have been more conscious than previously. But, I'm sure there's still a lot of mileage to be had. Like, what do you perceive as an early signal? Exhaustion and/or fatigue after a day of work? Or perhaps something more specific?

Furthermore, how bad did things become?

Do you feel pain now though?

After a couple of hours, I do experience strange sensations that border on pain. Furthermore, there's (almost) always some level of unease/discomfort. Thankfully, resting continues to feel good and I get especially revitalized after sleeping well. But I acknowledge that this isn't sustainable.

If so what?

Wrist pain and fingers that feel wacky. So, this is basically carpal tunnel 101. This has been confirmed/diagnosed by both the general practioner as well as the surgeon. Thankfully, the damage is relatively tame still; the surgeon didn't see much distortion/damage in the x-rays (yet). There's also no need (yet) for a surgery and (hopefully) there'll never be. Which is very much reliant on me putting in the work and effort to make this as comfortable and (by extension) sustainable as possible.

You should address that immediately. At most points I would have answered that I felt no pain with my setup, because those things build up gradually, if you're at the point of feeling pain the time to take action is now.

I have taken some action; but I'm still very much in the process. I'm aware it's just not enough (yet). But, the steps I've taken so far have thankfully led to significant relieve already. Like, I was a lot worse last year. And, as hinted at previously, I already have plans to address the remaining issues.

my point is that the plugin ecosystem for it might be a bit less extensive, and not sure how to set shortcuts that use vim key bindings for other plugins.

You could be right on the plugin ecosystem; even beyond the integration of evil-mode*. It doesn't matter which metric I throw at it, the Neovim ecosystem seems to be more vibrant. Though, at least for the time being, org-mode seems to be Emacs' forte. Which..., just happens to be the very thing I'm using it mostly for. While I'm far from being comfortable with it, it has already provided a much better experience compared to all other text editors I've tried.

I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.

Why?

My apologies, perhaps I should have been clearer. I didn't stress enough how this was mostly for trying it out and get going initially. I'm still on Doom Emacs, but I do intend to build my own config after I've gotten a better grasp IF it's beneficial.

And that's another point for Nvim for me, their configs are very easy, I followed this guide and had a working config that I could easily expand in no time.

Hahaha 🤣, I would have loved to have an up-to-date video guide like that for Emacs. Alas... 😅.

I miss org-mode

Hehe 😜, though I wonder: have you tried out Neorg or nvim-orgmode to see how they fare by comparison?