When, a few years ago, I really started to get serious about using Emacs, I spent three days or so going through the customization options for pretty much everything, or at least everything I could figure out at that time, and adjusting it to taste. Since then, I haven't had to touch it except for minor tweaks. Emacs is what they used to call "a moby frob"; some initial investment is required, and it took me three or four tries before I had the perseverance to stick with it, but the payoff has been handsome indeed.
As for slow starting, the best way to solve that is by running an Emacs server, and creating and killing client frames at need. You only pay the startup cost once that way, and all your editor instances share history, buffers, and everything else, which is sometimes handy, and doesn't get in your way otherwise.
As for slow starting, the best way to solve that is by running an Emacs server, and creating and killing client frames at need. You only pay the startup cost once that way, and all your editor instances share history, buffers, and everything else, which is sometimes handy, and doesn't get in your way otherwise.