I use option like the others have said. I am like you, diving into Emacs; in my case purely for the swank/slime lisping environment.

It's been pretty difficult as I am a dyed in the wool VIM user. Someone on HN recommended the Evil plugin (http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home) for an approximation of VIM movement and other bindings. It surprisingly works pretty well. It's letting me remain productive while I slowly adapt to the emacs key-bindings over time.

I am using emacs-prelude as well (https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude) which is a startup scripts kit.

I'm still not sold on emacs yet, but I am giving it time.