- read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking
wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software!
once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!
e.g. "Emacs Prelude", one such configuration or "distribution" of Emacs, used to disable the menu-bar by default as recently as a year ago: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb
One thing I dislike about the manual is that it rarely presents examples, but commands like describe-variable and describe-function often help elucidate usage. Not to mention external packages that makes all that even easier.