Replied to a post by Frank Meeuwsen

Ik weet weer niet exact waarom, maar ik heb vanmiddag weer een paar uur stukgeslagen aan het leren van emacs. Zoveel auteurs, programmeurs, hackers en productiviteit-knutselaars zweren er bij, dus er moet wel iets goeds in zitten. Ik vrees echter dat ik moeilijk ga wennen aan de conventies voor de s…

It took me a lot of perseverance to get into emacs. I love it now though. The reason I got into it again (I’d dabbled a long time ago, before subsequently using vim instead) was I was looking for a libre alternative to Workflowy. This brought me to org-mode and then I also came across spacemacs, which combines emacs with the vi-like keybindings that I was very used to. It also has a very nice default look and feel and plenty of useful features configured out of the box. So I gave emacs another shot.
I persevered this time because I really want to use libre software wherever possible. Emacs must be one of the longest running free software projects out there, and I feel it will exist for a long time after other editors have come and gone. It is really hackable and has a great community of people hacking on it.
I would never make the claim that Emacs is better than any other editor, there are many good ones out there, and I think it really depends on what you want and why. But I can quite definitely say that after using emacs regularly for a few years, I absolutely love it, and can’t imagine myself using anything else anytime soon.
I can’t recommend a good tutorial as I never really did one end-to-end, just dipped into different things here and there.
Bit I think series of short videos can be better than text tutorials for this, sometimes.
I haven’t watched this series, Using Emacs, but I see it linked a lot, so it might be useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kBWM3RQQ8&list=PL9KxKa8NpFxIcNQa9js7dQQIHc81b0-Xg
This one is quite good for org-mode, not least because he sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQS06Qjnkcc