What is your text editor of choice?

Gedit for me

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

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.

Obviously vi; also mc(edit).

Well, back in the DOS day, I used edlin :)

Nowadays, it's vim, an upgrade from vi.

It's the finger memory, you see. My fingers have learned this editor. I like how I can run an external command from within the editor and come back to where I was before. I like the command history. I like how it saves searches and can run them on several files. I like how it can jump from file to file. I like how it can go to the background and come back again.

I don't use a lot of customisations. I move from machine to machine and it would be a pain to have to move .vimrc every time. So I just stick with the basics.

But, damn it's quick.

When I'm working on the console, I like to use nano. When working on GUI, I like to use textEdit.

For quick and dirty, vim. For programming or anything serious, jEdit. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't come in any distro, but it's awesome anyway.

Gedit, Shell, Hotwire

I rotate or switch them regularly. I've used vim, emacs, gedit, eclipse, scite and others. Not so much nano (although I used to use pine an awful lot for email).

Rotating editors first gets you used to finding the best functionality in each, and being able to pimp them out, or quickly get them to behave. It means you can understand frustrations around coding standards and styles that may be awkward in other editors, and you will keep such styles/standards simple when you get a feeling for it.

This helps when working at other developers workstations - ie if you pair up, and swap over for a bit, you don't suddenly feel that awkward "umm - its vi, I don't know how to save" moment.

Most editors have far more functionality than the casual user will know, and plenty experienced users only know different subsets of. I can't say any of them are better, and as for more extendable, it is usually a matter of patience apart from the most simple editors. Generally unless you are using windows notepad.exe (through wine - people dont actually do that do they? Ewww) most editors are very flexible and extendable.

Try it - once you've been through the learning curve for a couple of gui and curses editors, you'll start to get the intuition to find what you are looking for on most editors.

sed is excellent. This is the most amazing text editor ever. Then emacs for programming. gedit I use with sudo (for editing system files), as it loads quick. Don't want emacses with different user contexts.

Also been looking at some IDEs: Eclipse(not got far), MonoDevelop(I like better than MS-visual-studio), and Eiffel-Studio (This is the best MS is getting all its [good] ideas for .net from this IDE and language).