Here is my own experience with text editors :
Any editor you choose will have shortcomings. Unlike many I think that VS is a good text editor. Most people who dismay it often doesn't even know it at all : it has macros, auto indenting, uppercase as a shortcuts, excellent tag navigation, and a very nice command line (my favorite command is 'of' which open any file in the project by it's name ).
I don't like it for php, javascript and web stuff in general : so I use VIM then. The editing stuff in VIM are incredibly superior to VS. It has a very simple extension system which means lot's of plugins. The modal behavior is what really makes VIM powerful, because that way you have many more free keys for shortcuts. What I use the most : vertical selection, vertical edition, switching files with ease, macros, grep with quickfind window, 'go file' to follow includes. I often google for one liner for sorting lines, deleting stuff under some special cases. The default configuration of VIM is very bad although, it's only good if you're going to use it to edit one file at a time. I switched to VIM because I wanted to have a pure text editor where everything was accessible without the mouse. I find that hunt and pick with the mouse is not very efficient.
It has a price though : My coworkers often makes fun of me because I have shortcuts for absolutly everything (thanks to FARR
...
I tried emacs, but I don't like it, it's just an editor with really weird and long to type commands and you have a learn a whole ecosystem to use it truely. The shortcuts doesn't make sense to me either. I tried several times, I can't use it. It has some good thing still : it can open really huge files with syntax coloration without lag (vim lag horribly ), it can fold big files and store fragments into other files transparently, it has more powerful plugins too.
VIM is really my favorite for php, javascript and ruby. VS is my favorite for anything C++, C#. As anything, some things aren't done in the same way of all editors, you have to adapt your style. I also tried various scintilla editors (they often offer too few functionnalities beyond just the scintillarea control ), E (way too java and slow ), notepad2 and notepad++ (nice, but not as good as VIM ).
Only VIM, emacs and VS can filter and open file by their name only by using keyboard (that's the function I care the most about ) and this is what mattered to me in the end.
It reminds me of the classical learning curve of text editors :
http://blogs.msdn.co...learning-curves.aspx
