Have you tried evil mode with vi bindings? The good thing of org-mode is that it runs locally and through ssh, but any task outliner tool is useful to organize thoughts or tasks.
evil mode is pretty good, but I find that there's a few rough edges. Also, I can't find a good type-ahead search plugin for picking files like in TextMate, Sublime Text, or (my current preferred tool) the Ctrl-P plugin for Vim [0].
You probably want helm. I generally just have one key that considers open buffers, files in the current directory, recently used files, and then locate. You can also use it with ag or find or whatever.
Helm is closer to vim's Unite (which was inspired by it) and can be used with arbitrary non-file related sources (e.g. the text in the current buffer).
Can you provide some examples and/or the name of the packages etc. I've just started emacs and the way I use dired mode is too slow. In terminal I have a bunch of aliases for fast navigation. How do you do this in emacs?
You can have aliases in emacs as well - just use bookmarks. Set a bookmark with C-x r m and jump to a bookmark with C-x r b (I bound this to a "bj" keychord to invoke bookmark-jump faster). If you install ido/helm/ivy, you'll have a quick fuzzy selection mechanism to grab whatever bookmark you want with just a few letters.
Plus you'll want to install a fuzzy file finder like find-file-in-project.
you need projectile to create projects (most of the time it's automatically inferred from the VCS) and helm-projectile to jump to any project file with fuzzy lookup.
Ctrl+P is a bit more "fuzzy finder" than ido-mode. It fuzzy finds paths under the current directory (or up to a project root if there is one above your current directory, though this is configurable). You can switch between "find in filename" or "find in path".
I've grown accustomed to it, but it's not the end-all-be-all. For example, I can type exact filenames in some work repos and get matches that are not for the file I'm looking for because the fuzzy finding is too fuzzy and starts hooking in matching from the directory structure in the path.
