That's a lovely reply! The problem with emacs is there is just too much, and the chaff obscures the wheat. It frustrates me too, as there's some really good stuff there that I don't know about.

Suggest grabbing the emacs book https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-gnu-emacs/0596... and/or the emacs manual from https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/ (free pdf) and go through them. They will repay the time!

Good luck and remember any pro emacs user will trip themselves up to help newbies learn!

Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596006488.do

I've been using Emacs for ~5 years now, and I switched from Sublime Text. I used Vim here and there but I wasn't a huge fan, and I always heard that Emacs is _the editor_ that can solve anything. Org mode is what got me really interested so I read through that book and switched to Emacs fully after a couple of weeks of light usage and reading.

Now I only use Emacs, and I've never been happier programming. It's truly a remarkable piece of software.

Edit: just want to say that you should use vanilla emacs and try not to install any plugins at first. Resist the temptation to go willy-nilly on some awesome-xyz list.