Patience and curiosity. I started using emacs because practically speaking it was the only game in town for writing common lisp. Spending so much time in it I b

Patience and curiosity. I started using emacs because practically speaking it was the only game in town for writing common lisp. Spending so much time in it I began to learn how to get around. A good autocomplete engine and the fact that everything is namespaced means that a lot of functionality is easily discoverable. For example `M-x org- TAB TAB` shows me most of the interesting things I can do in org-mode, and if that's missing `C-h f org- TAB TAB` gives me every function that's defined in the org namespace. The documentation in the help viewer is generally complete, and jump-to-definition means that I can trivially see how something's being done. Once the basics have been learned I think there's also an implicit assumption that the user hacks on emacs (or at least their init.el) to make the things they do easier. In a sense emacs is a make-your-own-IDE-toolkit -- pretty much everything about how it works can be changed if you like.