Unpopular advice but: turn on the menus / use Emacs as a GUI program.
The menus are good and help you with stuff you may want to find, or things you didn’t know you wanted.
Alternatively? Escape X (M-xin “the lingo”): a type-to-find for certain kinds of commands Emacs can do. Can also list the keyboard combinations.
I’m interested in editor longevity. I’ve been using BBEdit on the Mac for most of 15 years - started in the mid 1990s - , but when I made a move cross platform that didn’t work anymore. Really don’t want to switch editors every 5-10 years as editors become popular, then reach past their peak and are abandoned as the previous hot thing.
Oh, and I can use Emacs on my Mac desktop, my Linux laptop, Windows laptops AND (thanks to running it inside a iSh) my iOS devices! Cross platform!
On other notes, I needed something with easier customization than VSC AND wanted my command line experience to be the same across Windows and Linux. Hello eshell, the jokes about Emacs being an OS are right! I also like playing with things in different ways: I want a command line shell that’s not coupled to POSIX, and I can build it in Emacs. A menu bar that is mine and I can add to. I do appreciate M-x and I know VSC has its command palette which I used quite a bit when I was into that editor for a while.
You can upload your statements and bills into it sure, but for budgeting it will help you as much as a piece of paper will: you can set up a notebook or a template or upload a (in your case register) PDF but have a calculator handy because it’s not a spreadsheet.
Depending on how complex you get it still may work. I could probably move my personal bill tracking method into the Remarkable, but some people expect Mint, which this won’t be.
I was initially worried about storage space for you, but I’ve been paperless almost a decade now and my bills collection is 500MB. So ?? should be fine ??