Emacs is actually a surprisingly good file manager. Dired + Ivy + knowing a few obscure shortcuts, and it's significantly simpler, faster and safer than either using Finder or Terminal.
I've recently dusted off Emacs again after a few years of VS Code, indenting to use it for some JavaScript/TypeScript client work. If anyone's interested, here's my Emacs setup. If you temporarily move ~/.emacs.d and clone this there, and open Emacs, it'll setup the rest for you. (Although it's a bit bare-bones so it presumes you're already familiar with reading Emacs config files and figuring out how to use it.)
Fun dired trick: dired is essentially a styled, read-only output of `ls`, but you can use standard Emacs combination for switching buffer from/to read-only mode, C-x C-q. Once you've done that, you can literally edit the output of ls (or most of it) to make it reflect the desired state, and then press C-c C-c to commit, and dired will apply the changes.
I use it almost daily, it's particularly useful for batch renaming files - and since you're working with an editable text buffer, you can use whatever tools you like - like copy-paste, regex search&replace, multiple cursors, etc.
It's also smart enough to know to use a temporary intermediate filename when you rename multiple files to use each other's names, e.g. swapping a.txt and b.txt.
I tried emacs for about a week, but ended up just going back to vim because I'm comfortable with it.
However - over the years, I've realized that its not vim that I want, its really vim keybindings that I want. I have them built into pretty much everything (file manager, browsers, PDF navigation, etc). I like the workflow.
Can you recommend any good 'vim to emacs' conversion guides that keep the same vim keybinding workflow?
* Window manager: emacs
* File manager: emacs
* Documents/Presentation: emacs + latex mode
* PDF viewer: emacs