If you are seriously interested (which I highly recommend) just throw yourself into it. In the case of emacs, effort put in is directly correlated to efficiency

If you are seriously interested (which I highly recommend) just throw yourself into it. In the case of emacs, effort put in is directly correlated to efficiency gained. I was proficient in basic text/code editing in a few hours and incrementally tried to shoehorn most editing/scripting problems to be solved with emacs. There is an emacs wiki[0], the tutorial built into emacs[1], and a stack exchange network (mostly for questions related to emacs lisp which you will want to tinker in pretty soon after using the tool) [2]. Just a note, emacs could be a full desktop experience, supporting reading/writing email, web browsing, document browsing (pdfs, html, etc.), picture viewing, text editing, automation guru, etc etc etc. Some caution against some of these features but I use it mainly for text editing and automation support. It has a very robust keyboard-macro-recording tool, for example. [0] https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial [2] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ Additional reading [3] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf [4] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs