personally i'd use something like spacemacs. it combines the power of vim with the power of emacs. it's not perfect and you should use the develop branch of it

personally i'd use something like spacemacs. it combines the power of vim with the power of emacs. it's not perfect and you should use the develop branch of it because the master one is woefully out of date. the idea of spacemacs is that they have layers that you can enable or disable that seek to customize the defaults of emacs to 1. work well with vim in all modes, 2. collect and configure sane defaults for packages packages(akin to vim plugins) relevant to the feature. some say to use emacs with a blank canvas and to learn it from scratch but, frankly, the emacs defaults are absolute rubbish. it's a good way to get a reasonable emacs out of the gate and you can always cut the cord if you really want to later. magit is a fantastic git UI. helm is a great ui for searching lists of things(used very often)