Eric MacAdie has a contribution to this month’s Emacs Carnival that talks about his major mistake in learning and using Emacs. That “mistake”, he says, was not embracing Emacs completely when he was introduced to it. Instead, he learned only a few commands—he estimates about a dozen—and limped along with those. He might as well have been using Notepad.
Fortunately MacAdie did finally fully embrace Emacs and started to learn as much as he could about what it had to offer. This wouldn’t have been much of a story except that I keep seeing people expressing the attitude that they’re too busy to learn Emacs. “Why doesn’t it just work out of the box?”, they ask.
The thing is, it does work out of the box. To be sure, your Emacs life will doubtless involve customizing it to fit your specific workflow but Emacs is perfectly usable without making a single change. The thing is, you have to be willing, as MacAdie was, to actually make the effort to learn Emacs in order to realize its full power.
Learning Emacs is not trivial but it’s also not that hard. Irreal has published plenty of stories detailing its advanced use by non-technical people, most recently here. If you want to advance beyond, say Notepad, put in the effort to learn Emacs. It will reward you far in excess of your effort.