I use a variety of editors depending on where im at and what im doing. I use vi or preferably vim for light things like editing configuration files or quick and dirty scripts. If I am doing something heavier such as writing a 1000+ line perl program I will use a nice graphical programmers editor such as nedit, gedit, or jedit. I recommend any new UNIX user and especially professionals to be able to at minimum do basic things with 2 terminal based editors such as vi or emacs. Investing a little bit of time learning to use awk and sed has yielded a ridiculously large rate of return on my time.