Okay, I get it: Emacs (especially vanilla) just doesn't meet your requirements. So be it! Horse for courses, as they say here in the UK. All I can say is that I find most, if not all, other tools so frustrating. I can never get them to work the way I want. With Emacs, I can. Yes, this means that I have to work at customizing and this is not easy for a beginner. But I can.
One minor point, in case anybody else reading this thread might find this useful: >> What about turning on whitespace-mode? > > That makes all the spaces visible, which isn't legible. As with all things Emacs, this is completely customizable. You can have whitespace mode show/highlight the bits you want and not the others. -- : Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50, Org release_9.3.2-233-gc2bc48
