I'm an emacs believer (the idea of a programmer's text editor really just being a lisp environment makes a ton of sense), but I'm a very part-time user. There are just so many idiosyncracies that make it hard to get into. No one seems to drink their own kool-aid more fervently than the emacs community, it just feels like "this would make it easier for new users" is never allowed to be a design rationale for anything.
For me things started to get easier once I discovered cua-mode and xclip-mode. I have read some arguments about why these aren't the default, I think those arguments are sensible if you have a PhD in emacs, but for the other 99.99% of humanity they are just big signs that say "go away." It's very silly to me that the defaults haven't evolved and become more usable - the definition of being a power user is that you can and do override lots of defaults anyway, so the defaults should be designed to support new users, not the veterans.
For me things started to get easier once I discovered cua-mode and xclip-mode. I have read some arguments about why these aren't the default, I think those arguments are sensible if you have a PhD in emacs, but for the other 99.99% of humanity they are just big signs that say "go away." It's very silly to me that the defaults haven't evolved and become more usable - the definition of being a power user is that you can and do override lots of defaults anyway, so the defaults should be designed to support new users, not the veterans.