Another way to look at it is saving time and effort to do it right at the start. Learning how to use emacs without paredit and then learning again with paredit

Another way to look at it is saving time and effort to do it right at the start. Learning how to use emacs without paredit and then learning again with paredit is twice the work of just learning once with paredit. Ditto projectile (with projectile-helm) If you get used to smacking tab a zillion times while opening files to autocomplete, upgrading to helm find files after the tab habit is deeply ingrained will be painful (tab in helm find files is the help key, not the autocomplete key, helm is conceptually like "always on autocomplete" times a million sorta) Also with the ecosystem of modes, meta-e usually does the right thing in all the modes unless you're editing something that doesn't have the right mode installed by default, then you get used to not using the keystroke M-e, possibly all the time in all files, which is really bad because M-e will work if you simply install that file's mode package. Obviously this extends way beyond one keystroke which multiplies the impact. Its possible to use emacs at least two levels. Theres low level where the editor helps you navigate and format, if you permit it by adding file type packages. Then there's the high level where magit or org mode are nice CLI applications almost stand alone. So if you start out at a high level emacs with "my vim-alike can also run magit, so to me emacs is just a vi that can run magit" you're going to miss out on the substantial performance gains of low level emacs like navigation keystrokes. Maybe a good programming analogy is its much simpler to start noob programming students on msbasic.exe, but everyone seems to think almost anything else as a first language is better in the long run, even if almost everything else is harder to use for the first fifteen minutes.