To reach a level of skill where using emacs is easier/faster/better than something like intelli-j (for instance) requires significant dedication and repetition.
Far, far more than "a few hours".
Not the parent, but I've spent a significant amount of time with pure vim. I use vim bindings in everything from my web browser (vimium, vimperator) to my WM (i3 & kde vim navigation bindings), to my text editors & IDEs (atom, VS, sublime)
Despite all that, I still find using pure vim to be ineffective relative to just using Atom, Sublime, VS or whatever with vim bindings. I may have internalized the most basic navigational concepts, but the more advanced / esoteric shortcuts that are essential to use vim as an exclusive editor are still ones I need to look up - and that's not counting stuff specific to vim packages liked nerdtree.
At the end of the day I'm sure you could always argue that I should have practiced differently / better / more or whatever - but to what end? There are plenty of full featured text editors on all platforms that do everything I need. Why on earth should anyone force themselves through dedicated practice just to learn the intricacies of a 20 year old editor?
Not parent but I have. I still would recommend something else for all the stuff I work with.
That said, it is amazing, I just believe in my line of work people are better off spending time learning an ide, esp refactoring, efficient search/ replace as well as how to enable block selection.
I sometimes do to. In particular, when that stuff is Java or C# - it's hard to beat the support IDEs gives you there. So I personally opt to switching said IDEs to Emacs keybindings instead.
(Also, one could argue that you need IDEs there mostly as crutches to support the weak language, but that's a topic for another day...)
> better off spending time learning an ide, esp refactoring, efficient search/ replace as well as how to enable block selection.
Refactoring - if you mean semantic transformations supported by your IDE, then yes. See above. But for search/replace and block selection no IDE beats the convenience of Vim and Emacs. They simply can do that better and more naturally (along with plethora of similar things helping with selection and navigation). And this is exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my previous comments - you can learn both under one Pomodoro if you focus solely on it, and then normal work will quickly take you to proficiency.
Humans have this funny thing as they grow older - they look at a thing, maybe try it out for few seconds, and then immediately determine it's too difficult and it will take forever. They rarely bother to spend actual five minutes, to the clock. If they did, they might actually have learned something.
25 minutes of deliberate practice - a single Pomodoro - is enough to become acquainted with several of Emacs features - like, navigation by semantic units and incremental search and autocompletion. You won't get proficient in that time, but it's enough to rewire yourself to actually start using it when writing code. Which will then lead to you becoming proficient while doing your regular, billable work.
Seriously, set up a Pomodoro timer, sit in front of Vim or Emacs, and try to practice a few things. You'll be surprised how fast you can learn.
(And yes, I did that, so I'm not talking out of my ass. I actually almost doubled my Emacs productivity once in 5 pomodoros - in 2.5 hours - two of which I spent watching Emacs Rocks videos, two on rewriting s-expressions with Paredit, and one on multiple-cursors.)