When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.
It had such a pleasant interface for that time.
But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes.
Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics.
> When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.
The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit.
But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale.
So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.