Toward a "modern" Emacs

I'd been VSCode as my text editor for Markdown documents. It supports all I need out of the box: navigation with bookmarks, columnar selection, search&replace and a clipboard ring. All of them can be learned through visual menus.

I honestly don't know what you want more from a pure text editor.

And yes, there's an IDE on top of VSCode if you need it (though I prefer IntelliJ products).