What is your text editor of choice?

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

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.

Vi is my choice too

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

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 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.

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!!

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