Well this issn't the first time I comment on that topic (it's getting a bit boring slowly...) but most likely it also won't be the last time. I tried some editors already and my final conclusion is that VIM is the one that works best for me. What means best? I can edit text very fast and efficient with it and it works logical for me (didn't in the first few weeks) now. I can use it at my linux box at home, at my win-box at work and it works fine with anything else I use. There are plenty of good usefull plugins available but even with the default-VIM and without my pretty huge vimrc I can still work very well with it.
I think it's a thing of personal preference if you like vim or not, if you like emacs or not. Depends on what OS you started on, if you are a win32-person you probably won't like VIM very much because it's not win-ish IMO. If you come from unix-systems you like vim because you have to learn VI because it's the one editor that's on every box wherever you go. Emacs got some other nice extensions but you usually need your config-files etc to work with it and it's not available on every box.
Well okay I know VI(m) is hard to learn when you aren't used to it. But once you understand the logic of it a bit and know some more commands you'll pretty fast see how fast you can work with it...

giant