Since I’m old and need to deal with administrating a bunch of machines for work, I settled on the most dull and unsurprising distros of all: debian. Sure, when I was younger and eager to learn and with much time on my hands, I used gentoo (basically what is now arch) and all the others too.

Maybe try guix

Emacs will always be abe to do things you can’t do with other editors. It’s a text based interface toolkit that happens to also have a good text editor and IDE capability. Buuut, you need to spend a lot of time to set things up. I use it since probably more than 20 years and I still often need to look up and learn stuff. If you want a tool and not a workshop, get a simpler editor.

A gap in the pdf or actually a gap because you took years to figure it out? Both interpretations are funny.