What is your text editor of choice?

It depends upon the environment, and there isn't just one.

The first editor I used was TSO/SPF on an IBM mainframe, with 3270 block-mode terminals that had a completely different idea of "full screen editing" than we have now.

I started on Unix with AT&T System V in the 80s, and learned vi because it would be available on any Unix machine I used. I came to the PC in the MS-DOS days, and learned WordStar for the same reason - it was likely to be available on any PC I had to work on. (And vi and WordStar share a characteristic: they are keyboard-independant. If you have a QWERTY keyboard and a Control key, you can use them. Some early terminals used on Unix didn't have F-keys or arrow keys, and there was almost as much variation in the early CP/M micros where WordStar originated.)

I gained some fluency in Emacs, too, but normally used vi. Emacs back when worked best if you invoked it when you logged on and did everything from within it - it essentially became your shell. Most of what I was doing as a SysAdmin was config file changes and shell scripts, and Emacs was overkill. (I had Emacs customized to use WS commands to avoid retraining my fingers.)

These days, I use Vim under Linux from the command line, and Geany as a GUI. Geany is a GUI editor intended to be a lightweight IDE, and is based on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control, which adds syntax highlighting for a number of languages and code folding "out of the box".

Under Windows, I use a fork of Florian Ballmer's Notepad2, which is also based on Scintilla, and can be set to replace Windows Notepad, but I have Don Ho's Notepad++, Vim, and Emacs around, as well as various other things.

My choices are largely determined by the content I edit, which is text files, config files and scripts. If I were doing large scale development in C++, Java or the like, I might use a full-blown IDE like Eclipse.

My experience gave me a general interest in editor design, and I'm maintaining a wiki devoted to text editors at http://texteditors.org. Thus far, the wiki has identified 1,690 text editors. If you know of/use one that is not listed, please add it.

Personally, I prefer vi over any other for the ease.

Gedit for me

being as I am just now getting the hang of Debian and almost all the readme's info and searches on the web give the how-to-do's in vi so I've been learning the hard way how to use it and I haven't played with the GUI editors yet. that's me 1 1/2 cents worth

OK let's try this again after the join process. I switched from Wincrap to Linux about 2 1/2 months ago so I am still very much the newbie, that being said I have found most of the info i find out there always seems to start "vi ......." so I have been learning the hard way how to use it, but it's doing everything it says it's supposed to, and I've only touched the surface, and as for a GUI editor, not sure which one to even start looking at!!

I have to say VIM does the job for me.It is very well documented in books such as the excellent A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming by Mark Sobell. He has an entire tutorial on VIM.

I feel great using vim, for heavy lifting emacs is the one. Although its entirely different for each person, my friend uses nano even for writing and modifying code.

And I really don't get IDEs.

I prefer vim. There are a lot of shortcuts which make vim user friendly

Vi is my choice too

I typically use emacs, but I'm familiar with vim and ed as well. It seems like a good idea to know vi/vim, since some version of it's available on just about any system, and ed, in case nothing else will work. Both emacs and vim have their merits, though; I use emacs more because I'm more fluent in it, not because I think it's better.

For a beginning coder, though, I'd probably recommend something like geany or Notepad++, both of which I used early on. Both have plenty of features to help coding, but require very little learning to use practically, unlike emacs or vim.