CoC and Nerd tree are popular plugins, but I personally found CoC slow (on a 7 year old laptop) and I've switched to using coq with neovim's native LSP (helped by LSPconfig) and I've always used Chad tree by the same author.

A couple of other plugins I commonly use are: fzf, vim-polyglot, auto-pairs, nvim-treesitter (this has many IDE's beat IMO), vim-which-key, lualine.nvim, nvim-web-devicons, barbar.nvim, gitsigns.nvim, rainbow-parentheses.vim

You can also set scrolloff and sidescrolloff to something like 99999 to keep the cursor centered.

For the rest I have Shift+hjkl for 10 line jumps and Ctrl+hjkl for jumping between panes. You might want to increase your keyboard repeat rate (I have a timeout of 200ms and a rate of 70Hz personally, but that might be a bit fast for you), some hardcore vim users may also like to swap caps lock and escape, but I had mixed results with that.