Protip, don't try and learn it all at once, it's like drinking from a firehose. Go through the tutorial, learn the basic stuff (open/save files, exit, search, replace), and then add new stuff as you actually need it.

I've been at it for over 16 years, and I'm still learning new stuff surprisingly often

that's why I love spacemacs - with the default setup, you hit the spacebar and a text based gui with all the possible options pops up. it allows me to continue to actually work instead of floundering about for some simple action while hammering the keyboard shortcuts into me through repetition

I'm giving spacemacs a try now, thanks

Overwhelmed with what exactly? (long time Emacs user here, just curious)

I start with something I want to do, say, change the color scheme, enable syntax highlighting for a programming language, or something like that and then I end up tumbling down a rabbit hole, and I get stuck because most of the resources out there that tell me how to do these things assume I know a lot of basics which I haven't mastered yet.

In that case, I think you might be better off with more of a minimalism approach: don't try to configure everything and anything from the get go but add features incrementally only when you really think they're necessary.

After many years of using Emacs every day, I decided at one point to throw away my .emacs file and start from scratch. You know, it's a little bit like the old saying about how you should code every program you write twice: once to learn how to do it, and then a second time to get it right.

I had been using Emacs for a while but especially when I first started out, I was maybe as overwhelmed as what you describe. And so I probably did too much, tried out too many things. But hey, that's how you learn, right? After many years, I had acquired much more proficiency, found out by experience which things are essential and which packages that I had installed I actually didn't really need.

And so I made a completely new, empty .emacs file and manually added only a minimal number of configuration options (carefully avoiding copying anything over from my previous .emacs file -- the temptation would be too great to put more than I needed).

Of course since then I have added more and more stuff over time, but I still strive for keeping my .emacs file small. It's not so much an irrational ideal as it is an attempt at keeping it manageable. And so sometimes when I open my .emacs file for some new option or whatever, I use the opportunity to also go over the file and reconsider its current state. More often than not, I end up throwing a whole bunch of stuff away again and make the file smaller and simpler.

A lot of features that Emacs offers through various packages are convenience features. They're great. But they're not essential. Essential is stuff like `(blink-cursor-mode 0)` (I would go nuts otherwise) or `(global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'backward-kill-word-or-region)` which has become muscle memory to me. Themes and other visual goodies are less important.