Text Editors

In my years as a programmer, I have used many, many different text editors.

At first I used editors with the normal GUI interface with a lot of mouse interaction, a regular file menu, and normal key bindings. But then, I started playing with gvim and emacs. I was impressed by the power and customizability of both of these amazing editors, and really like the fact that there was no need to use the mouse at all. In the end I chose vim/gvim as my editor of choice. The learning curve was a little steep, and even steeper than for emacs. However, it has the convenience of not constantly having to press the ctrl key. (I have recently remapped my caps-lock as a ctrl key, which alleviates that somewhat, but I didn't know that was possible at the time). I also worked as a software developer for a year on a team that primarily used gvim, and so I got used to using vim there. I wouldn't say that vim is intrinsically better than emacs, but it is what I am used to now, and I really like it.