Over at the Emacs subreddit, Informal-Silver-2810 says he’s been a Vim/NeoVim user for the last 20 years but decided to try Emacs so he committed himself to a month of using only Emacs. As part of that experiment, he asked the Emacs subreddit what advice they have for a new Emacs user.
The thing that stood out to me was how varied the advice was. Some folks suggested starting with vanilla Emacs, others said start with Evil mode but not packages like Spacemacs or Doom. Still others suggested starting with Spacemacs or Doom or perhaps one of other starter packages.
You have to feel sorry for Informal-Silver-2810: the advice he got included just about every possibility. On the other hand, that probably means there’s no royal road to learning Emacs and that everyone has to discover their own best path.
My own path worked well for me and looking back, I can’t see that any other path would have been better or even as good. As a Vim user I was all in on modal editing and—after more than two decades—Vim’s keybindings were burned deeply into my muscle memory. Nevertheless, when I finally took the plunge, I just jumped into vanilla Emacs and didn’t bring any Vim habits with me. Except, that is, for that muscle memory. For a long time I would do things like use Ctrl+k to move up a line. It almost looks like it’s doing the right thing so by the time I realized what was happening, I had deleted several lines. Thank goodness for undo.
A couple of the commenters had stories like mine but most other strategies were represented too. It seems to me that the best answer to Informal-Silver-2810 is to just feel your way and do what seems easiest for you.