Exactly. I never see the reason of trying to memorize stuff like this. Just learn one useful feature a day, and use it! After a while, it'll just be muscle memory.

Agreed. I have a silly item on my todo list that says "become an expert at emacs," but the trick is to use it everyday, and each time you find yourself doing something repetitive, ask yourself "maybe there's a smarter way to do this," google it, and voila.

On a sidenote, I shelled out for textmate and it's very nice, but now that I work in a more diverse dev environment (Mac/Linux/Windows, and ssh'ing to boxes) learning emacs has become critical for increasing my average productivity.

Still, I don't regret buying textmate. It's beautiful, functional, and inspired some nice features that were subsequently copied/incorporated by others. I wonder what the next version has in store, and how far off it is...

I think that goes without saying, although most of the techniques discussed apply to anyone who would use TextMate. One could compare it to learning vi, but vi kind of forces you to sit down and learn because it's almost unusable without putting a good bit of it into muscle memory. I ran thru some of these, mixed+matched, read some TextMate docs and whipped up a quick cheat sheet on card stock that I taped to the top my center screen. Hopefully the horrificness / embarrassment will motivate me to memorize them.