As someone that's tried many times to learn Emacs, I found Vim's basic features a lot easier to pick up.
I think that may be because all the mode changes are single keys, rather than Emacs, where I constantly have to ask things like "Okay, was it control, alt, meta, or some combination + S to save my file?"
Vim does the : command line thing, but it's an actual command line, with editing, rather than a series of hotkeys.
This annoys me because I'd really like to learn Emacs. It seems you can live in it - but the learning curve is hardly gentle.
I have more or less the same problem coming from vi(m). I forced myself to use Emacs for about 2-3 months to get past the "this is hard because it is unfamiliar" stage.
I found Emacs to be relatively pleasant as an environment for hacking source code but I was nowhere near the same level of proficiency at editing with it after several months of usage compared to where I was within a few weeks of forcing myself to learn vi(m).
Emacs has a lot going for it as far as out of the box functionality and the ease of installing packages but it seems that unless you want to take the time to dive deep and learn the minutiae of elisp and configuration you are never really going to become super proficient with it.
The one thing I did come away with after using Emacs was that swapping ctrl/capslocks is the best thing ever and helps even with vi(m) and I now do that for all my environments even though I never touch Emacs anymore.
I think that may be because all the mode changes are single keys, rather than Emacs, where I constantly have to ask things like "Okay, was it control, alt, meta, or some combination + S to save my file?"
Vim does the : command line thing, but it's an actual command line, with editing, rather than a series of hotkeys.
This annoys me because I'd really like to learn Emacs. It seems you can live in it - but the learning curve is hardly gentle.