I won't lie, it's a painful first few days. It feels slow because you have to look up every little thing you want to do and mentally translate what you want to

I won't lie, it's a painful first few days. It feels slow because you have to look up every little thing you want to do and mentally translate what you want to happen into these new strange keystrokes. Really, it's all about your frame of mind. If you go expecting to hit the ground running you're going to be frustrated. But if you come from the place where you know you're going to go slow and you're just going to do it anyway for a couple/few weeks then you'll have a much better time. One thing I think is important is to not overwhelm yourself. You'll want to do all these cool things but you'll never remember the nifty commands if you don't even know the basic ones. Just use it for a week or two with just basic cursor movement, cut/copy/paste, saving and quitting. It'll feel like "nano" but with worse keys. Maybe learn isearch after couple days, and query-replace after a week or so. Seriously, don't even think about "buffers" for the first couple weeks. Emacs has so many features and editing commands that you're guaranteed to get overwhelmed if you try to take everything in all at once. It also really helps to be in close proximity to someone who uses emacs so that you can ask questions as they arise.