What text editor do you use?

[Amlux]

I use Vim (Neovim technically).

I've done the following path with my text editors:
Atom > Notepad++ > Geany > Vim > Neovim
And I've liked each one more than the previous. What's so great about Vim? It gets out of your way more than any other text editor I've used. And yet, I keep being shocked at just how much you can do on Vim without even needing to download plugins and extensions. One of the best things about Vim is the use of registers. Basically imagine you have a different clipboard for every letter of the alphabet, so you can keep a lot of stuff you need constantly locked and loaded while still copying and pasting to your heart's content elsewhere. I use Neovim primarily for the support it has for Emmet, which is a great tool that makes writing HTML much easier.

I don't see myself ever switching. I've never tried Emacs but the only thing that could tempt me would be Doom Emacs since Vim keys are too deeply ingrained in me now!

[Deoster]

Right now I mainly use Geany, especially for HTML. I have Neovim and know just the bare minimum of how to use it, and it is my first choice for very quick edits to config files or tiny, simple text files, but for anything more complex Geany's interface and format is just very intuitive to me. It's really mostly the keyboard shortcuts I've gotten so used to like Ctrl+C/V, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+A to select all, Ctrl+Shift+Arrows to select previous/subsequent words, etc., and the lack of those in the terminal or in editors like Vim was and remains a bit jarring for me in the switch to Linux. I know that all it will really take is a few hours sitting down with documentation or a good tutorial and I could wrap my head around and get used to the Vim way of doing things, and I'd probably be much more efficient that way. However, nothing about Geany really annoys me or feels like it gets in my way so it might be a bit before I get around to making that effort.

[Amlux]

However, nothing about Geany really annoys me or feels like it gets in my way so it might be a bit before I get around to making that effort.

Yeah, you definitely don't want to get stuck in the cycle of constantly trying to improve your tools and never getting to the stage of actually using them to make things. I really did like a lot of stuff about Geany.

One thing that Geany has which I haven't been able to find an equivalent for in Vim is that you can open a bunch of files in different tabs and do a find > replace on EVERY FILE open in the session at once. That was super useful for changing things across my entire website.

[oannes]

FocusWriter for anything lengthy with the theme set to Old School. For shorter things (such as posts like this) I use Windows Notepad. I tried for awhile to use plundered Scriverner but it just didn't gel; too many functions to get distracted by, few that I actually needed.

[AIpiqiA]

Have been using Obsidian for notes, used Neovim (raw and unconfigured) for a good while now for editing config files primarily since I switched to Arch like last month or so. I use VS Code too on my Windows laptop since I've had it for forever since everyone recommends it when learning programming, which I've attempted and failed at multiple times due to not having enough reason to keep doing it (I figured I'd be better off working on things instead for my purposes at least), and its really convenient for editing html and css which is my main use for it.

Since I want to hop off from Obsidian and VS Code, I've been looking into Emacs and downloaded Doom Emacs a few days ago. Currently I'm using its RSS reader (elfeed) and code editing capabilities, but the main thing I was drawn to it was orgmode, which funnily enough I have yet to try out. Dired is also a really cool file explorer. I also want to try using it for email.

[netdoll]

For the time being, I just use whatever the standard CUA style graphical editor that comes with my desktop environment is (Pluma on MATE), GNU nano for terminal use, and occasionally dabble with GNU Emacs if I have a large file and I need to do incremental searches in it. In my case, I know this is a state of affairs that can't last forever and if I'm going to become more experienced with computer usage I'm going to have to lock in and learn one of the three major non-CUA editor families (vi, emacs, wordstar) in some amount of depth in order to be comfortable using a computer going forward.

Right now, my bias is towards (n)vi (not vim, which is an important distinction), since it's available pretty much everywhere in the Unix world and quite capable without succumbing to featuritis like some of its derivatives (the aforementioned vim, kakoune, helix, etc.). That being said, it's good to have proficiency in multiple editors, particularly if you work with odd and obscure platforms where the editor choices don't exactly align with what is considered common or standard (Plan 9 comes to mind here, with sam slotting in the role of vi and acme slotting in the role of emacs).

[Comfortable1]

(n)vi (not vim, which is an important distinction)

Great, thinking, VimScript is the bane of my existence. It's hypocritical for Vim users to claim that Emacs 'breaks the Unix philosophy' (interpreting E-Lisp...)

[drummyfish]

I'm a nonreligious Vim user with a very minimal .vimrc (just turning on line numbers etc.), I kinda hate ricing and don't even feel any urge to do so -- my point is to just use what is very close to the most universal/common text editor found on any remote server I ssh into so that I can immediately and comfortably edit anything. On my desktop I often use even Gedit or Pluma for quick note taking or whatever, just use whatever's at hand (as long as it's not an IDE ^_^).

[netdoll]

(n)vi (not vim, which is an important distinction)

Great, thinking, VimScript is the bane of my existence. It's hypocritical for Vim users to claim that Emacs 'breaks the Unix philosophy' (interpreting E-Lisp...)

To be honest I think the idea of implementing a large portion of your editor in a high level macro extension language is a sound one, but the way Vim and VimScript interface with each other is rather bungled. As far as any "Unix philosophy" whiners, I would like to remind everyone that:
(1) the original Unix crew all used line editors like ed and qed on teletypes, so if you want to engage in pointless masochistic exercises over what is "the most Unix", start there
(2) the MOMENT they got access to bitmapped graphical displays and mice, they redesigned their editors to take full advantage of them (sam first as their vi-counterpart and then much later on Rob Pike saw Oberon, said "we've gotta have some of that", and made acme as the sort of "Unix philosophy" counterpart to GNU Emacs)
(3) in between those two periods, when glass teletypes were in regular use as an interface for timesharing computers running Unix at Bell Labs, Warren Montgomery (formerly of MIT) did a reimplementation of the original TECO Emacs (no extension language) and it was used internally at the Labs by many people who had been exposed to screen editors earlier in uni and wanted more of that experience.

In general, the most important thing about the original vi is that it was designed to run on a wide range of glass teletypes/terminals at potentially very slow addressing speeds over the network (claimed down to about 300 baud) and with a wide array of diversity in existing key layouts at the time (so things like cursor addressing/arrow keys were not a given), thus many of the design conventions of vi were informed by that experience and hanging on to them after the original reasons disappeared is mostly vestigial. It's also interesting to compare it to WordStar, which was designed with the same "we don't know what keyboards people will be using and the only modifier key we can guarantee is Ctrl" base motivation, but had access to instant screen updating since it was running locally on microcomputers, so it omitted modes in favor of doing a large amount of modeless commands all mapped to Ctrl (the famous "WordStar diamond"). Not sure what I'm really trying to get at with all of this, but I do think it's cool

[Comfortable1]

the original Unix crew all used line editors like ed and qed on teletypes

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html