That sounds like something you could add to dired mode and bind to a key without too much trouble. It's my understanding that you sort of have to start molding

That sounds like something you could add to dired mode and bind to a key without too much trouble. It's my understanding that you sort of have to start molding emacs to your particular style, and that the defaults are kind of bad. I have switching windows bound to ctrl+direction. Super easy and convenient. Also some of the plugins augment Emacs so much that some people see them as part of emacs rather than an add-on. I don't use dired; I use helm/ivy. I am having good luck with Doom Emacs. You may want to check it out, especially if you are used to the Vim keybindings. It provides a lot of extra functionality out of the box.