I am looking for tips for learning Vim or Emacs the smart way

Question

I am a quite happy user of Eclipse (I mostly develop in PHP and Python), however I found the answers to \"What specific productivity gains does Vim/Emacs provide over GUI text e

Answer 1

Nearly everything you see or interact with in Emacs can tell you about itself -- you just need to know how to ask it.

To learn Emacs, learn about the current Emacs context: what the values of things are, what the relations between them are, how they are denoted, how you can change them or otherwise interact with them.

The most important thing to learn is that Emacs is Emacs Lisp -- it is a Lisp ecosystem. Learning Emacs means also learning Emacs Lisp -- the more you know, the better. Lisp is the most flexible and most powerful way in which Emacs realizes itself as "the self-documenting, extensible editor".

Icicles can help you learn Emacs and Emacs Lisp. It helps you ask Emacs about itself. This page gives an overview of the ways it does that: Emacs Newbie with Icicles.