I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs ruined all other text editors for me.

There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.

How did you approach Emacs to make it such a valuable tool? I have tried to get started with Emacs a few times but the initial resistance has been too large

When I first started, I found the keybindings odd, but now I love them since the core set of shortcuts—C-a, C-e, C-f, etc.—work "everywhere" from the terminal, to GNU readline-based programs, to even native macOS text boxes. If you don't like the default keybindings, you can change them or use the Evil package [0] for Vim bindings.

If you want to get up and running quickly, I'd check out Doom Emacs [1] which is easier to configure and takes care of a lot of configuration for you. I personally use a reasonably-minimal config I wrote myself [2]. If you like to tinker, I'd recommend writing your own config, as it will also teach you a lot about Emacs.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out—contact info in my profile.

[0] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil [1] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs [2] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el