(I wrote this mostly on my phone, sry)
If someone asked me, when it came to tech/software, what would I recommend, I'd say a dual-boot machine with Linux on it. If you're not too computer savvy, something like Ubuntu - not a paragon of privacy but leagues better than Mac or Windows. Why, just for security and privacy? Duh, it's digital S and P! But also, if you work at all, there is an "art of Linux" which is difficult to relay without sounding like a total nut, but You will be much more effective at work, and won't feel like you're fighting your machine. There's a gateway drug I can propose that shows the path to the land of Milk and Honey, or whatever else you like to eat.
First, think about how you use a computer; theres a mouse and a keyboard. And you might have had a teacher along your school journey who would admonish that using keybindings (shortcuts) was much faster. But its not *that* much faster, is it? Is it "worth it" to learn a bunch of keyboard shortcuts? Am I really saving time? Even if I am, is it worth the hassle for some meager time?
Yes, but the "saving time" thing is missing the point, even while true. You've probably heard aome BS Ted talk about "flow state", and well, I'm referencing BS I guess. If you do everything "faster", rarely move your hand to the mouse (rather than the endless back and forth), you enter a flow state in which you're more effective. But again, it's not just about being faster, but being more effective. Vim has keybindings that let you do all kinds of stuff.
Why bother with all this though? At the end of the day, I can type with my keyboard, and also press Ctrl+S, amd everythimg else with the mouse; "if it aint broke dont fix it". Well it is broke. See, you dont spend most of yohr time actually writing, most of your time is spent *editing*. Cut this fluff out here, move that paragraph there, replace these words, repeat some particular edit, cut this sentence, etc. And yes, you can do this with a mouse... but now editing becomes EDITING, mouse time, hunting and clicking time. And writing becomes obtrusive, worse yet, actually checking its not garbage.
Vim is designed as a text EDITOR. Its centered around editimg, with the write mode, or "insert" mode, being different. This makes it awkward to use at first, but omce you get the hang of it, you can really get in the zone while editing stuff, and because the whole experience isnt awful, you actually start to somewhat enjoy the process, or at least its as bad a chore as any.
It's like learning to cut food properly with a knife, rather than using a knife like a moron and having a bunch of gizmos to do the knife's job. The latter is very annoying, and the lazy way out... but if you know how to use a knife, its unfathomable to rely on those gizmos and cut ztuff wromg and think thats okay.
So how is Vim a gatwway drug? Well first you might ask "How am I gonna use this with MS Word?" And simce I opened with Linux evangelization, you might suspect I'm gonna tell you to throw Word out the window (lol). And yes, partially true. You can find ways to use Vim on Windows (should be a ailable to Mac), but the idea is you edit a plain text file, like in Notepad. Now if you wanted you could copy amd paste into Word to do final edits bla bla bla, but this is a clearly clumsy stop gap measure.
The next drug is LaTeX (pronounced something like Lah-Tek; Lah as in Lamma, Tek as in high tech). TeX is a markup language that lets you write and format PDFs as you please. And since youre writing the "source script" (which is then compiled into a pdf), you are writing in plain old text... and thus you can use Vim. While it might sound difficult, its actually very straightforward, requires no programming knowledge (in spite of being a markup system), and lets you use Vim.
By this point, you'll have all sorts of files sitting around. Probably lots of random text files and some tex files. How to organize them?
If youre using Linux, you already have some nice shell language to manipulate files and navigate directories in the terminal (terminal emulator, to be precise), probably bash, but maybe youre using something else like zsh. These are already leaps and bounds over powershell (altho probably familiar to Mac users, if you use it, the shell language now is zsh, a similar but more powerful alternative to bash). But then you discover ranger. Ranger lets you use vim commands to navigate directories, manipulate files, amd even enter some shell commands! You can quickly amd easily move files around, enter files, and so on.
Remember the days when people actually had files on their computer? You didn't need service to access them! Just a clunky app, likely. But the thing is... when you download files off the web... they go to the Downloads folder with some awful nonsense name, and then its YOUR job to organize them. In Windows this is frankly very annoying, maybe so in Mac world? Either way, we trade the convenience of streaming (Netflix, Apple Music, Sporify, etc), for the autonomy of local files and... oh wait.
Now that youve got ranger, vim, bash, all this, suddenly local storage isnt inconvenient anymore. No slow file manager, with annoyimg clicking to make folders, rename, select a group of files, etc. Suddenly managing files is stupid easy. While partially we go to Netflix amd Spotify for novel new stuff (lol), and cause we dont have limitless local storage... some things could be locally stored (maybe a show you like to watch im particular, or some albums you like to have handy). And suddenly its painless. There's stuff in Linux that lets you manage artist name, album, etc as well!
Whats notable thus far is we havent really left the terminal (you can listen to music in the terminal on most distros). And it hasnt been painful - quite the opposite, clunky firmware apps are generally brutish and slow, and inefficient as well. This is because, when it comes down to it, using a computer is largely about manipulating and organizing files, amd if your computer can do that easy, integrated in one spot, well then thats the dream experience. And for a lot of things we want to edit, if its text based or can be made text based, we can utilize vim to extend this seamless experience.
Soon youll start ricing out your software, trying out windpw managers (and additionally enablimg you to use vim bindings to switch windows), swpappimg key bindings, all sorts of things. Maybe you start writing bash commands, or using git properly (you dont need to be "coding" to be using git!). suddenly programming is kimd of nice. Maybe you make a website; easy to securely access your server (ie ssh), easy to navigate the server (its probably linux based), and easy to write the HTML, CSS, or WhateverScript you need. Maybe you'll do none of this, just finesse your familiarity with the powerful basics. But you should get some vim-like shortcuts in your pdf reader...
You'll wonder why you couldnt do this before... its bc everything Windows and Mac does keeps you on crutches, so these things almost dont make sense in those worlds. GNU/Linux is the land of milk and honey.
With all this freedom, and the basic skills to enjoy said freedom, youll start to more acutely consider matters of privacy and being screwed over. You'll turn to secure browser, maybe try out Tor, or use a VPN (not nearly as safe as Tor btw), you'll start to grasp the evil of JavaScript, see it to rarely serve the core function of the web, to give textual or graphic info, amd more often be wielded for selfish or even malicious ends. And really, you don't even need to know how to code to participate in all of this, really.
At the beginning I said you should keep a dual boot, and this is because some software simply isnt around in the Linux world. You might want to flip back to it, or plunge further and try out the Linux alternatives. If you get the proper Linhx experience, you wont want to leave.