I used to use jEdit, which is still a very nice editor. And it ran on Mac/Unix/Windows, which was good because I moved among all three systems. But the last I l

I used to use jEdit, which is still a very nice editor. And it ran on Mac/Unix/Windows, which was good because I moved among all three systems. But the last I looked (three or four years ago) development had stalled. And I got into a job where I periodically had to SSH to various Solaris boxes and edit on the console, in Vim. I knew just enough Vim to edit config files and simple shell scripts without too much pain. Then I'd come back out to jEdit and start putting :s and other Vim commands in my files. It was hard to shift gears. So I decided to pick an editor that I could stay with for a long time, maybe forever, because it did so many things and was so configurable. It had to run on my Mac at home, the Windows nd Unix machines at work, and also on the console. It came down to Emacs or Vim. My boss was an Emacs guy, and could do wonderful things with it. But I'd had a few RSS problems, and I'd read about what Emacs did to some users' hands. So I went with Vim, and I'm very happy with it. Really, the only downside is that I don't have Vim everywhere, so when I'm stuck somewhere that doesn't have it my hands do the wrong thing. (Like in our crappy email system. I write long messages in Vim and paste them in, but I do short ones in the mail client. And hit escape when I'm done. And then hit cancel to say that I'm not abandoning the message.) As far as I know, the only editor more configurable than Vim is Emacs. But Vim does do a lot. I use it for Ruby, shell scripts, HTML, CSS, XML, Perl, prose, looking around in log files, and more. It handles long files easily. You can script it with its built-in language (not as powerful as ELisp, of course) or other scripting languages. I sometimes meet people who don't know the difference between Vi and Vim. When I say I use Vim they ask how I can get by with such a limited editor that won't split windows and doesn't have tabs and so on. So when I say Vim, I mean Vim 7.2, available at vim.org. But Emacs and other tools are worth getting familiar with as well. It's good to not be too provincial.