Have you tried evil mode with vi bindings? The good thing of org-mode is that it runs locally and through ssh, but any task outliner tool is useful to organize thoughts or tasks.
Some other examples of Ctrl-P replacements for emacs are fiplr, helm-projectile (helm-projectile-find-file), and helm-ls-git.
Helm is closer to vim's Unite (which was inspired by it) and can be used with arbitrary non-file related sources (e.g. the text in the current buffer).
Plus you'll want to install a fuzzy file finder like find-file-in-project.
I've grown accustomed to it, but it's not the end-all-be-all. For example, I can type exact filenames in some work repos and get matches that are not for the file I'm looking for because the fuzzy finding is too fuzzy and starts hooking in matching from the directory structure in the path.