I use vim all day, pretty much. I do a lot of work on Linux machines, and I usually connect via ssh. I like it and it does its job and is powerful. But it's not perfect by any means.

I think the whole vi vs. emacs thing is simply a matter of which one you learned first, or which one someone you respect (or learned from) used.

However, for local work, I prefer gedit. It is incredibly full-featured. Of course, I'm lucky enough to work on a Linux desktop at work. Back when I used to use Windows, I preferred TextPad (textpad.com). It's not free, but well worth the money, and you can hack together your own syntax files to customize syntax highlighting. I even made my own file for syntax highlighting for IBM's Net.Data server-side macro language (not related to .Net in any way).

ShawnMilo