As a devoted Emacs user I think the following is really the most important part of the article:
> Emacs is not really an editor either! I believe that Emacs is the ultimate editor building material. The out-of-the-box experience is kind of basic and somewhat weird, but I don’t think that anyone should be using Emacs like this. You take this simple foundation, you shape and mold it to your taste and preferences and you end up with the best possible editor for you and you alone. That’s the reason why you should consider using Emacs. … For me, personally, the ability to extend Emacs easily with Emacs Lisp remains its number one advantage over vim. There’s also the fact that you can re-create much of the vim experience with Emacs, but you’ll be hard pressed to re-create the Emacs experience in vim.
For me, this is really the key attraction of Emacs. It’s not an editor; it’s a library for me to build my own ideal editor. And, in the long term, there are very few editors which can compete with this.
So how to learn this? I used Emacs for a couple of years long time ago, but while the experience was ok, it didn't last. Is there a book/or blog about the magic you mention?
There isn’t one in particular I can recommend (or remember). Just look up how to install packages, look at other people’s configs, explore what packages are available, and so on. That’s basically what I did.
Where do I get other ppls configs? Maybe my problem is I do not know any Emacs power users.
If you are a fan of vim style modal editing, Spacemacs [2] and Doom [3] are two popular emacs "distributions".
[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude