It's been almost a year of near daily use and I feel like I've still barely scratched the surface. I've spent countless hours configuring and tinkering for which, I've come to understand, there is no end. It took some time and a good bit of reading to begin to wrap my mind around a lot concepts in Emacs. First is the simple fact that Emacs is not just a text editor. Far from it. It is an environment, an ecosystem. This realization was initially quite overwhelming. Unfortunately, when I'm overwhelmed, oftentimes my hardheadedness kicks in and I tend to make rash and dismissive decisions. Org Mode was the leading culprit in this case.
Org Mode can be so overwhelming that one doesn't even know where to start. But that exactly what you have to do, just start. It won't make sense and everything will be hard, until it finally does start to make sense which makes the rest of it much easier. I know that seems super obvious, but it's often a fatal stumbling block for me. If I don't readily understand something, have a clear starting point, or at least understand its purpose, it feels impossible. The tutorial Emacs Org Mode Tutorial by James Stroup, whom I still owe a review, went a long way to helping me understand what Org is, what it's for, and how to use it. Now, I've come to learn, Emacs is almost just the back-end for Org Mode. Of course this isn't entirely true, but so much of what I do is in Org Mode that it sometimes feels that way. I've even compiled and sent reports to my wife, who was duly impressed even though she knows nothing about Emacs nor Org. Even my config file is an Org doc. Org tables, TODO lists, calendar management, organization methodologies, linking documents, the list goes on and it's all Org.
Of course Emacs isn't just Org. My original curiosity was to use it for programming. I'd been using Vim and NeoVim for several years, but something about Emacs just kept tickling my brain and I had to try it. NeoVim is an amazing editor and makes for a great IDE. Movement and modal editing make everything so fast once you learn how to string commands together. There's a great line in the essay Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay) by waxbanks -- "Skilled vim users are terrifying to watch." The only problem is that it's only a text editor. A fantastic text editor, but a an editor nonetheless. If you want manage a project, a simple to do list, keep track of your calendar, or whatever, that's a different tool.
For a long time, I was okay with this because it seemed to fit the Unix Philosophy -- "Do one thing and do it well." Emacs, on the other hand, seemed to be the antithesis of this philosophy. That's only if you view Emacs as a single tool. On the contrary, Emacs is the tool box that holds an entire workshop of tools.
I'm still learning new things in Emacs pretty much every time I use it, which is almost every day. Progress has been a little slow because I don't have a tech industry job so I'm limited to evenings and days off. Even then, my progress is kinda directionless and meandering. I'm nowhere close to mastering Emacs, but I'm getting closer all the time. I still frequently refer to the Info pages and lean pretty heavily on AI via GPTel and Claude Code IDE for Emacs. I use Claude in GPTel for quick questions about (mostly) little things that have slipped my mind, and Claude Code for changes to config.org. I'm learning more and more about Emacs configuration and Elisp, but I've got so many other things going on that it's difficult to find time to really focus on learning how to do it one my own. Plus, Claude seems to do a pretty good job of things.
All in all, I'm really glad that I made the switch. I still use NeoVim for quick file changes when at the command line and on remote systems, but everything else is Emacs.
"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor." ― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line