You two are joking .Aren't you ?

There should be really no significant differences and certainly nothing worth worrying over. Install and use it and determine if you like it.

The reasons why I'm a huge user of emacs are because I'm a good typist, it gives me a user interface which I like, and whatever changes have occurred to it over the years haven't dramatically changed the editor insofar as how I use it and my experience with it.

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Yes

Sorry, yes, joking. I'd say that feature-wise nano is better than notepad. Vi is hugely more flexible and emacs has been jokingly refered to as an operating system in itself.

I worked on DOS back when it still only had edlin which only allowed edit of one line at a time. If you screwed up on line 35 you had start all over on line 1. Once DOS 5.0 came with "Edit" as a full screen editor my life was much easier. Notepad is an improvement on "Edit" so having lived through edlin hell I'll not talk bad about Notepad although these days I use (G)VIM on M$ Windows as a preferred editor.

Notepad works, I'll give it that, it's also (generally speaking) installed on every Windows PC by default. I have used it for years and still do for note taking and stripping formating when pasting text. But, when I used to write batch file, kix scripts and, later, VBScript I used either Notepad++ or Notepad2 (don't recall which where and when nor which I preferred). I know a lot of people don't like format highlighting and line numbering but for me they made life so much easier.
Thanks, typing that has reminded me I have still not aliased nano to show line numbers and that I really ought to play with vi some more. ^C^Zquit!!bye...

I could take or leave line numbering on every line, but who doesn't like syntax highlighting? The only time it bothers me is when it screws up, which vi used to do a lot with comments and quotes, but I haven't seen it lately.

What really bothers me though is vi's auto-indent "feature" which doesn't differentiate between typed text and pasted text. I hate having to run ":set paste" every time I want to paste something into the file and don't want it tabbed 250 columns over by the last line. I always just end up turning off auto-indenting in vi, which then becomes a pain when I DO want it to indent during actual development.

So as was mentioned earlier, I also typically use vi for checking logs and quick touch-ups on codes, and emacs for more serious development.

I don't use Notepad in Windows because it doesn't recognize Unix line endings. Wordpad does though. I usually just use Notepad++ when I have a choice.

I find line numbering useful for the inevitable "Syntax error on line ##" type situations. Even with config files I find that useful but for scripts it saved even more time.
I've a feeling the syntax highlighting issues were on of the things which put me off vi with the fact it stopped behaving over SSH leading to my use of nano.

I just use :num to jump straight to the line number of interest, don't need it printed out on every line as well.

An elegant solution I never did try on WinVi.