I know . . . it's been asked, answered, argued over, and fought over many, many times before.

I have to know, though . . . I have my suspicions that the LQ community will answer overwhelmingly one way . . . we'll see.

Vim vim vim vim vim vim vim vim.

Personally, I cut my teeth on the old Sun vi, and I still like it, which makes me an elvis man in the Linux world. vim is kinda cool, though, even though I only wind up using it when fixing Red Hat machines for somebody. (Usually my employer.) Any RHEL boxes I have extended duties on get elvis installed in short order.

The best thing about elvis is the nice monochrome syntax highlighting. Very cool, especially when coding C, php, or perl in an ssh session.

I have never even used emacs. One time I invoked it just for funzies and couldn't even figure out how to exit. It looked very lame, but I didn't waste more than a few seconds on it, so I really couldn't say.

I pointed out in another post here, that I always use vim, and I voted for it.
I don't really know emacs, I've never really used it ... but I've installed it and looked at it, and read a little about it, and it seems kind of strange to me. I think vim is very good, so I don't really see a reason to worry about emacs other than learning about it. I'm planning on learning about it, and who knows ... maybe one day I'd change my mind. But going by what I know about it now, I like vim.

I learned to type in 7th grade in the early 70's. Before there was a CNTRL key. So I have developed the habit of pressing control combinations such as cntrl-x on the same hand, which is physically painful. I don't think I'm alone in this.

My 2nd distro (day 3 of my linux use) was gentoo. They seem to lean towards nano during the install. I've used vi and emacs both, but habits are habits and I'm a nano guy.

There's no ed in this poll.

Started of with vi, failed to come to terms with emacs so got stuck with vi family.

I only used nano a couple of times before installing Gentoo.

I started with vi, switched to emacs which I liked much better (as a C development environment) and switched back to vi. Why? Because vi is on every system and "good enough"; as a contractor I had to be proficient in vi.

Emacs was an Integerated Development Environment (IDE) allowing integration of compilation and editing windows and I was able to enhance it by writing some macros to create skeleton C constructs such as a "for" loop etc.

Moved to General

Think of all the bad words that include vi:
evil, vile, vicious, vindictive, violence...
For the sake of your souls, brothers and sisters, choose Emacs.

Nano

I do most file editing while running X, so I nearly always use SciTE. For CLI editing I use elvis. I only know the most basic functionality to keep things simple.

The only time I ever tried using SciTE was when I was reading about Ruby using Windows XP.