> Looked at emacs the other day but I need to read a lot of manuals and tutorials and practice to get to grips with it)

My recommendation: Go with spacemacs. It is perfect for people who just want to use the goodness of emacs without it weird edges and spending hours on configuration. One day I might switch to emacs, but for the coming time I am perfectly happy with using a pre-configured emacs. The time I don't spent working, I'd rather read more papers and do non-compsci-stuff.