Learning Emacs is easy. It's loving Emacs that's hard. To love Emacs, you have to discover the features it has that you've been looking for, sometimes without knowing you've been missing them. And that takes experience.
The only way to get that experience is to start at the beginning—by actively using Emacs. Here are ten tips to help you figure out what works best for you.
Source: Getting started with Emacs, an article by Seth Kenlon.
It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier—closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level computer science courses, you started to notice something: All of the really great programmers—the kind who churned out 4 line solutions for an assignment that took you 10 pages of code to complete; the kind who produced ridiculously over-featured class projects in a day while you struggled with just the basics for weeks—none of them used Nano or Pico.
Source: Vim Creep, an article by Rudis Muiznieks.