To vi, or not to vi: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the fingers to suffer
The h’s and l’s of outrageous fortune,
Or to start using Emacs
I’m a long time vi user and still prefer it over any other editor. Although, lately I have been paying some serious attention to emacs. One thing that I don’t like about vi, is that if you have the most basic version installed, then it doesn’t come with syntax highlighting. Sure you can upgrade and get vim, but what if you can’t? And what if the only other alternative would be to use emacs which comes with built-in syntax highlighting for most languages? For most people, using their favorite editor is a matter of life and death (well, almost). Programmers are known to defend their choice of editors with religious fervor. Talk to them about the possibility of using some other editor and they cringe.
The choice of editor depends on many factors. If you’re primarily developing on Windows platform (and maybe ftp’ing or syncing your files with a remote server), then Eclipse is the best. It’s free and it comes with a whole lotta plug-ins for pretty much every language and technology. For Linux platform, it’s either vi or emacs. Although, both editors come with their own strengths and weaknesses, it’s best to know both. You should be at the very least able to open, modify, save, close without saving and undo (very important!) in both editors.
