There are 2 ways you can set some of the variables used by emacspeak. The 'standard' approach is to set them in your ~/.profile (or whatever the shell startup initialization file is - it can vary depending on what shell you are using. Other common choices is .bash_profile. ls -a will list all the 'dot' files in your home directory). The usual way to do this is to put a line in your shell startup file which sets the value e.g.
export DTK_PROGRAM=mac
The other way you can do this is to put a line in your emacs init.el file using the setenv command e.g.
(setenv DTK_PROGRAM "/path/to/servers/mac")
The advantage of using the shell startup is that it is easy to change.
Yes, you can set a default speech rate in your init.el Something like
(setq mac-default-speech-rate 400) should work. You need to make sure this is done before you load emacspeak. My emacs setup is available on github and might provide some examples. Note that it is fairly large and I've done it as an org file. Also, Raman has some good examples in the tvr directory of the emacspeak repo. Raman's examples are probably clearer than mine, but I use emacspeak on a mac, so mine may be more useful for mac specific settings. Note that I use the same init file for both Linux and mac, so there is some conditional configuration settings which are selected depending on what platform I'm on. The repo is at
https://github.com/theophilusx/emacs.d
For auditory icons, you need to install the sox program. Easiest way to do this under OSX is to use homebrew (which is also how I install emacs BTW). Setting up homebrew is fairly easy, although it has become slightly move complicated since El Capitan due to security enhancements added by Apple. My repo has my setup for auditory icons under OSX.
WRT to learning emacs - it is huge and will take time. It is definitely worth the effort. You will need to learn the emacs terminology and be prepared for some terms which appear to be inconsistent with common usage. This is mainly because emacs is very old and coined a number of terms initially which have been hijacked by other software solutions and have sinced evolved to mean slightly different things. The emacs built-in tutorial is a good place to start. The emacspeak info docs are also useful and emacs has a really good build-in help system, so getting to know it will also help.
Emacs has support for most programming languages, including python. I'm not a python programmer, but I do know lots of python programmers who use it as their main editor. It also has support for git - in fact it has a number of packages to provide support for git. The most popular one is magit. I personally don't use it much - the git command line is fine and gives me all I need.
Make sure your running the most recent stable version of emacs i.e. 24.5. the version which comes with OSX is very old. I used homebrew to install emacs. I run emacs in GUI mode (I have some sight and prefer the GUI version) and have it added to the dock. All I need to do is click on the emacs icon to start it.
These days, ELPA is the preferred way to install many packages. There are many ELPA packages. Avoid getting too carried away and installing everyting you think you might need. Wait until you know you need something and then install it. Installing too many things at once just because you might find them useful can overly complicate matters and there is also a risk that some package will introduce instability or unexpected configuration changes etc.My advice is to start simple, master the basics and then begin to look for solutions to things you need. I also strongly recommend drinking the cool aid and just accepting the emacs way of doing things - many new users make the mistake of trying to reconfigure everything. While you can do this, it has the disadvantage of potentially creating more problems and you miss out on possibly learning new approaches which hve been refined and devleoped over many years. Emacs is different, but for many it is those differences which set it apart. Trying to make it the same as editors you are use to runs the risk of missing the real benefits.
Tim
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