What vim can do that emacs often is a little too slow for and IDE:s can't is to have finished even quite complicated incisions and changes to your text before you've become conscious that you asked it to do the thing.

This means it can help keep out intrusions about editor maneuvering from your mind at work.

Some people see no value to this and fill their vim bundle with plugins that slow everything down a lot, but some of us really enjoy just surfing the high source and watching our thinking materialise on the screen seemingly effortlessly and immediately.

I use IntelliJ all day every day too, but it's mainly for admin and control stuff and certain types of refactors it can handle better. It's to my code editing as gitk is to my version control. It's where I run the tests, all the plugins, can get docs prerendered, things like that.

It's not where I can quickly navigate the code base, jumping immediately from file to file as fast as a fuzzy hint can get me, and then within the file as fast as Space+string can get me. You might have a keyboard layout with a forward slash easily available, mine doesn't so in normal mode space is /. Navigating in vim can be hjkl w b and so on, sure. But it can also be search. Just say the place and poof, you're there. It's wrong but very similar to where you want to go? n for next or try to name a new place.

This doesn't work in IntelliJ and it's a little off in emacs. I mean you can certainly technically do it but it's slow. There's waiting and the application twitches when it tries to imitate the vim way. Pretty much all finding tasks can be powered by fzf and ripgrep, and unlike IDE:s vim just does the thing when you tell it to. There's is no wait and then a dialog, there is none of 'ok, understand but Ide competent, knows many things, need more info before can do the thing' that tools like IntelliJ and Visual Studio do.

You also want jk to be Esc for sure. Esc is far away and CapsLock is for Control.