This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio (http://www.rstudio.co

This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio (http://www.rstudio.com/ http://www.rstudio.com/) which I really liked, and I wanted something similar for python but couldn't find anything to suit my needs. I set out to recreate the functionality of RStudio in emacs and have (largely) succeeded. It took a lot of mucking around but I really learned my way around the editor.