If vim doesn't click for you, I'd really suggest trying kakoune. It swaps vim's behaviour around - where vim commands are "verb-object", kakoune's default behaviour is to allow you to select things, and perform an action on them once you know what you're operating on. Movement is precisely equivalent to selection - w is "select the next word", W is "expand the selection across the next word".

The visual feedback makes it easier to pick up (for me), and also makes building up complicated sequences of actions very easy. Multi-selection ties into that as well - a common workflow for me when editing is to select an object (a-a or a-i), split it by some regex into multiple selections (s), then perform my changes on those selections.