Rebind Capslock to act as Ctrl when held and Esc when pressed, use a modal editing package like evil or meow. There's also devil-mode which does some smart heuristics on your semicolon so you can press it instead of holding Ctrl or Meta (Alt).

That's pretty much it without delving too much into specifics, it's important to note that most of Emacs' functionality can be called via M-x (the original command palette) and selected or searched for easily. No need to play piano with hard to remember key chords for rarely used stuff.