Text editing is something that consumes so much of a programmer's time that ease of learning is only relevant if you're switching every couple of months. If I

Text editing is something that consumes so much of a programmer's time that ease of learning is only relevant if you're switching every couple of months. If I was forced to switch from my current editor to a new one, I would honestly not give two shits how easy it was to learn. Why would I care how bad the first month would be? I'd be using it for many years to come. (If I couldn't count on that, it would be the wrong editor anyway.) The only kind of text editor that can tempt me to use it for a few months knowing I'll never be completely comfortable with it is a full-blown IDE with enough functionality to make up for the awkwardness of not being able to slice and dice text efficiently. Besides, what does it mean for a novice to be able to use an editor right out of the gate? Will a novice know the keystrokes to jump to the beginning of a line, jump to the end of a line, indent the current line, forward incremental search, backwards incremental search, delete to the end of the line, regex search and replace, display and hide the list of open windows, jump to the previous window, jump to an open window by filename, reload the current file from disk, diff two files, run Make (or Maven or what-not), or do any of the others things that a programmer does dozens of times a day when he's writing code? Obviously he won't, and he'll be working a little slower until he figures all those things out (or, for beginning and end of line, he'll be learning where the Home and End keys are on each different keyboard he uses.) Even if you know how to cut and paste in a new editor, you still don't know 10% of what you need to know to use it productively.