alt Hacker NewsAgreed. Work through the Emacs tutorial to find out how vanilla editing works. Then look at buffer management, window management (Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps) and simple tooling like search. Then start to tweak some settings in your config, find the bare minimum of packages you need to scratch your worst itches (for me: Vertico, Corfu, Avy and Dumb Jump). Finally, figure out tree-sitter modes, project/projectile mode and a couple of other foundations.
It will be a struggle. It was around 2 months before I felt remotely comfortable in Emacs. And nearly a year before I really felt at home. It's a long road, but gradually you mold the editor to yourself so tightly that you'll never be able to go back. The remarkable thing is that the progression never stops. The tool just keeps getting sharper and sharper.
Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps.
No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).