[maryrosecook]

I had a different experience to kabdib: customization made me able to actually use emacs productively.

I joined a company where most of the devs used emacs, so I kind of needed to adopt it too. I started with very little config and it was very hard. Because many operations were different to the GUI editors I'd used before, I had to waste 20% of my brain power to consciously do things that should be unconscious (save, cut, paste etc). This made it much harder to program!

The first step was updating the config to make emacs more similar to my old editor. For example: make it so pasting text when text is selected replaces the selection. Turn off branching undo. Install a plugin that gave me an autocomplete list of every file in my current project. Make it so that if I copy text in emacs, it appears on the OS-wide clipboard. I'm sure your list of things will be different.

Another important step was getting my emacs theme to look nice. This really made me love the program a lot more. It's silly, but there we are.

The third important step was finding things that emacs does better than other editors. For me, a big one was having a terminal inside my editor (lots of editors do this now, but back then it was rare).

Hope you end up loving emacs!