What is your text editor of choice?

I am a big vim fan and am using for almost anything possible. :)

I use nano in the console because you don't need a PhD to use it. Gedit or leafpad as graphical editor (leafpad opens much faster). I used nedit, which is decent. Also I use "less" a whole lot to simply view documents/files or piped output. "zless" reads compressed text files in /usr/share/doc.

I know a couple people who use Joe, and it seems to be a lovely little editor.

I do a lot of text editing: shell scripts, HTML (which I use for all my articles), CSS, crossword puzzles, PostScript programs, email, usenet, and even to compose replies to web posts such as this (I use the "It's All Text" extension in Forefox).

I always have an emacs window ('frame' in emacs-speak) open, usually with 50 or more buffers active. (It was over 250 yesterday.)

When I compose email or a usenet message, the app opens an emacsclient window.

When I am creating a crossword puzzle, I use shell mode where I have elisp functions to perform various operations on the word under the cursor: look up the definition, find anagrams, show previous clues for the word, etc.. Others look up and print a list of words that fit in a particular position in the grid.

I agree that there is no 'best' editor. My main reason for choosing vi over emacs was mostly that emacs was so big (back in the 80s) and vi was on all systems. Now, I'm comfortable with vi(m), and it's now not worth getting up to speed (again) with emacs.

I like the way that I can move quickly through a file with vim but emacs is almost more of a universal IDE/OS. If you lean to use Emacs' add-on tools, it can be pretty powerful. Each tool has it's advantages. which is 'best' depends on how you work and your preferences.

For quickly editing things like configs, I use nano. But for programming, I use vim.

I use nano in the terminal and sublime text 2 for everything else.

I like Nano to edit from command line. I like Geany from GUI.

Nano allows me to quickly access and edit files while using bash. I play minecraft and use bash to launch the server. I can quickly edit server.properties file without having to click around.

Geany handles GUI text easily. I can edit yaml files, or plain text. The line numbers allow for easy reference when I need to make changes.

I use vim in CLI and pluma in GUI

I currently have to code C stuff on a 13 year old AIX Unix box. The terminal handler is horrific, making VI a severe pain to use.
On more modern (Linux) platforms, my commmand line editors are vi and VIM. Often VIM's defaults colors for keywords do not work well with my monitor, so I switch back to VI.

Many times, I will ftp the source to windows and use notepad++. This editor should be ported to Linux. Kedit and gedit are two great GUI editors.

I use Notepad++ also when I am on Windows. Geany has many of the same features. Numbered lines, color coded text, symbols to denote returns, spaces, and tabs. Also documents pop up in tabs, so it is easy to go between them.

In Mint, Geany is in the Software Manager. It might be worth a try to save yourself having to swap between OSes.