Derek Taylor has a video that calls out what he says are Three HUGE Mistakes New Emacs Users Make. He says that many Emacs n00bs have a hard time getting started because they make the same three basic mistakes.
The first mistake they make, he says, is treating Emacs like Vim or other editors and starting it for each file they want to edit. This is one of the first things someone moving to Emacs learns. You have to modify the way you do things. What I and many others do is start Emacs when I first login and just keep it running for the whole session. As a practical matter, that’s until I reboot the system or restart Emacs because of package updates. Taylor recommends starting Emacs in daemon mode and calling emacsclient when you want to edit a file. That’s okay but not as efficient for my workflow, especially since I do almost everything from within Emacs. In either case, you avoid the relatively long—compared to other editors—startup time.
The second mistake is using some sort of file manager to choose a file to edit. Emacs, of course, has Dired that does this and more. There’s no reason to use a separate application for file browsing especially since it leaves an unneeded application running and taking up screen real estate.
Taylor’s last piece of advice is the most controversial. He says that you shouldn’t run Emacs in terminal mode unless you’re running on a system without a GUI windowing system. Some people have very strong feelings on this question: they’re either all in for running the GUI version of Emacs or they insist that real programmers stick to terminal mode. Although I almost always run Emacs in GUI mode—because of the extra capabilities you get—I’m pretty much agnostic on the issue. I do think that the GUI offers enough benefits that you should use it in most cases but it doesn’t bother me when other folks choose to run in the terminal.
It’s an interesting video. If you’d like to watch, it’s just short of 13 and a half minutes so it should be easy to fit in.