nano for the console (with the colors turned on)
nedit for the gui (with the colors turned on)

Seriously, I tend to cut and paste alot, and keyboard only editors really don't so well for that.

I use and like most of the editors in the poll though.

Scite is an excellent GUI text editor for minimal resource and slow systems. Such as it is great for PDA's. I use it on my Linux-based handheld. It makes good use of tabs like Firefox, for different text documents you're working on.

4. Stopped paying attention to $EDITOR wars because:

a. They know that in the future, Emacs has already won.

b. They were too busy actually using their $EDITOR to:

i. Write code.
ii. Read email.
iii. Play games.
iv. Manage the filesystem.
v. Browse the interweb.
vi. NO, NOT VI!

All in good fun. While Emacs is the best, Vim is a very very good text editor. However, it lacks one thing: Lisp.

The three editors I use the most, in the frequency in which I use them are:

1. Emacs
2. Vi/Vim (depending on which platform and what is available)
3. NEdit

All three of them, to be honest with you, can do all routine tasks and much more. I tend to use GNU Emacs the most at home, but Vi the most at work (Vi on Solaris, Vim on Linux).

I was using NEdit quite a bit for composing text, but lately I've just been keeping Emacs open and doing it there. Works great.

I fool around with practically all of the editors on the list. Most of them, to be honest with you, could handle the majority of plain text editing tasks, whether writing programs or composing text. Most of the choice is convenience and catering to the way people work. I'd imagine that most people would hate the way that ed works, but frankly, even it would handle nearly all routine editing tasks, it just would not be as convenient.

Kate would probably be next on my list after the ones mentioned above, just because I use KDE quite a bit.

Kate:

1. Sleek
2. User Friendly
3. Hassle Free

Okay, these are a few words from a guy who really has no dog in this argument. Personally, I will admit that my editor is Kate. Emacs puts me off somewhat, vi outright scares me, and sed makes me want to curl up in the fetal position for a good cry.
But here's my point: if we are going to run a poll like this, shouldn't we make an argument based not on how good each editor is overall, but which editor has made the most improvements during the past year if it's older than one year, or which new editor has surpassed expectations?
And here's my list of text editors

1. Kate
2. Emacs (preferably XEmacs)

Anyway, I'm off to my beloved OpenOffice ;-)

For console, nano
For GUI, gedit

nano works for me. I just don't get the fanaticism vi causes.. well I'm no programmer so I'll just STFU.

actually i also dont quite understands the fanatism and the rush of going for linux windows things in osx ...

i did choose bbedit for the "notepad" thing replacement(or maybe there isnt any need for any replacement at all) ...

guess that its the underlying "frameworks" that are the problem for a proper replacement of windows things ...


.

vi/vim is the best

Kate for me, always....

If vi had the name 'Midnight Commander', it would hand down be the best!

Before he got Bluefish, my brother used Gedit (Since it has tabs) for his Web authoring.

Okay, to lengthen out a already long topic, what do you think are the must requirements for a text editor? Regular expressions, line numbering? In short, what features could you absolutely not live without?

• syntax highlighting
• auto-indentation
• quick access to compilation environment
• regex search / replace
• extensibility
• not language-specific

I want to see what I'm writing, hence syntax highlighting, which is always helpful at quickly and visibly understanding the meaning of a line. It should also handle indentation automatically and intelligently, e.g. if I'm writing in C and I type an open curly-brace, the next line should be indented. I should also be able to compile a project with just a couple keystrokes, see the output, and navigate through compiler errors (where applicable). Of course, regular expressions are a huge help when doing mass edits on a single file, or across multiple files. Also, I should be able to add features where I see fit, for example, I wrote support into Emacs to print a buffer by running it through a2ps first -- it's a very simple function that fills an important task for me. Lastly, it should not be language-specific, or in other words, no editor that only handles Java would be good enough. Most IDEs are straight out because of this, simply because they don't support languages like Erlang and Objective Caml, which I use frequently.