What is your text editor of choice?

Emacs all around - except for when I have to work on some PHP code.

In the console, I use nano (never liked vi/emacs) - simple, effective and universal.

In X, I find KATE's Sessions feature invaluable to have lots of projects open, each with its own set of files. So I can have, say, one session called "Comp" containing my computer-related files, "Web" has my website HTML files, "Scripts" has all my BASH scripts, "Music" containing my musical text files, "Songs" has my songs, "Poems" likewise, "Acc" for my financial accounts, etc. Syntax highlighting and standardised key bindings (even a VI Mode if you prefer) make KATE very easy to use,

For GUI: gedit For CLUI: vi

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).

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.

Gedit, Shell, Hotwire

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

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

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.

Obviously vi; also mc(edit).