Vim

Vim is fantastic in so many ways, several of which have been touched upon by others.

The features that keep me coming back to vim year after year are:

(1) It is quite possible to perform all editing tasks without a mouse (!). This is a huge plus if you're editing a text document and find that moving your hand away from the keyboard to grab the mouse is annoying and time-wasting. It takes time and practice to learn the keyboard commands, but once learned you'll wonder how you ever worked without them.

(2) The ability to record keystrokes and replay them. I do this multiple times a day and find it far superior to any other gui approach to making the same changes in various locations of a large file. For example, suppose you wanted to change the middle name to a middle initial in a text file with 100,001 lines, each line containing firstname, middlename, lastname. You could easily program the keystrokes to position the cursor at the next middle name, remove all characters except the first, and reposition to the next middle name of the next line. Then simply tell vim to execute that same sequence 100,000 times - and voila in a matter of seconds the job is finished!

(3) The ability to edit column-based blocks. If all lines of the text file were aligned, and you need to modify, say, columns 21-36 of every line in the same manner, you simply highlight the columns and perform the modification. With most gui editors you would manually edit each line seperately.

.. these are just three of my favorite vim features. There are countless others.

BTW I've been using vim every work day since it came out in 1991, and used its predecessor, vi, for the 7 years prior to that! 30 years of vi/vim and still going strong!

[Edited by rmbjr60, August 08]

I have been using Notepad++ for quite some time now, but had the feeling I have to try Vim out on Windows too, not just using it as a terminal editor. Day by day I find it more productive and fun than Notepad++. It's like changing from PHP to Ruby for me ;)

It's like you have another one person who refactors code for you) Usually, when you use something like Sublime Text, you have wide freedom to write something with Python to do things. But it's strange for a little task, like edit end of each line with defined criteria, for example. Instead, Vim can just repeat what you do with simple and intuitive command-line inputs! It can just "press" dozen of keys and oriented in document instead of you. Just like bot or half-bot)

Really, if you think you are already typing quickly - you need to start using Vim, because it can do things without typing at all! Of course, I wrote the first thing which came to my mind, and any comment doesn't describe this software good enough. You should learn it.

Everywhere, easy on resources, extensible, ssh-friendly, open source, mature.

It's the most powerful and the fastest text editor that I've ever used.
I write all the text and code on vim, and then I paste it on other programs for the final formatting touches.