so does anyone else find M-f a little counter intuitive? My brain wants it to put the cursor on the first character in the next word. M-b seems to do as I imagine it would. Is this a leftover thing from my vim experience? Do folks get used to it or switch the behavior? I assume I'm just missing the real functionality of putting you in the space before the word.

Using C-s seems to offer similar confusion for me. if I start typing in C-s println it puts my cursor well into the word wherever I stopped typing. Searching backwards with C-r keeps me at the first character in the search term which I prefer. I think I'm just missing why it should behave like that.

@chase-lambert M-f is “move forward over word”, not “move to next word”, that helped me grasp it a bit better. You can change the behaviour: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1771102/changing-emacs-forward-word-behaviour