pico - for users, mcedit - for programmers, vi - for professonals 
I'm using vi but only because it's not worth the hassel of attempting to get a better editor installed in the place I work (too much red tape).
Talk like that could touch a nerve. What editor would you prefer should "red tape" not be an issue?
Aw c'mon.. no ed?
Seriously, though. I mostly use Vim for.. well.. everything, and I use ed to look cool in front of my *nix friends. Yup, I can make ed say things other than "?" 
A beautiful ex-girlfriend of mine (should have married her!), at my prodding years ago, wrote her entire masters thesis in VI. When she graduated from her University she landed a nice paying UNIX job at Lycos.De because, of her great UNIX/VI skills. VI pays $$$ !!!! 
emacs is so cool!!!!
True. And once you've managed to press more than 15 keys simultanuously you can unleash its power to the full extent.
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift ;-))
I prefer editors one can use without being a professional pianist.
bakunin
I use nedit. 
I sometimes pronounce it "six" 
if I'm in a hurry
cat > file
type stuff
^D
For those who like UltraEdit, the windows port of Gvim has a beginner mode that's modeless (you can just start typing without messing around with 'i' and ESC). From what I've seen of UE, it's about 95% identical to VIM just with all the keyboard and :ex stuff moved to menus.
--Alex
i use emacs. this book is discussing the topic in-depth.
weird enough, noone seems to prefer emacs here. i was actually expecting a classical "emacs vs vi" discussion 
we're being politically correct here - no religious debates.
~
~
~
~
~
/tmp/vi.mKf2F8i3M7: new file: line 1
there's nothing better in the world..
i think vi or vim is king of all editors, every basic and expert user prefer to use this easy and popular editor.
Me too. Doesn't come with the (my) package, but it's worth installing it.
i learned vi because it was the only editor installed on 99% of our machines. while some have pico -- none have emacs. odd.
since then i have grown to really enjoy vi. it is a small-footprint wysiwyg editor and appears to be what i was looking for during my windows years. no wonder i used to like notepad.exe so much!
i think i'll have to reset my nethack.cfg to the vi-style config.
can't beat VI.
I have added nedit to the poll. Now you nedit guys can vote too.
I know I should use vi, everyone says it's good for me; but like the ugly-flavored cough drops of my childhood, I cannot stomach it. I've learned it's basic usage at least 5 times, but it's so alien it never sticks.
I prefer pico-like shell editors, especially nano since it has syntax highlighting, text-replacement, searching, regex, and other stuff I'd always wished pico had.
I started using vi when I had an AT&T Unix PC (68010 with attached monitor, 20 Mb hard drive, SVR about 2) and vi was the only (reasonable) game in town. When I got a job using VMS (the Very Malevolent System) in about 1992, I asked on comp.editors what was workable as a vi clone. (Eve vi emulation was a travesty, but then, I was using VMS anyhow.) One reply came from Paul Fox telling me about vile, which had been ported to both VMS and DOS.
I started using vile and loved it. It was based on microEmacs, and still had the same extension language. I then spent about 1.5 years on the Dark Side (GNU Emacs 
), but decided I most needed an editor, not a complete user environment.
In my idle time, I started tinkering with vim, which is what I use now. Even after over 10 years with vile, vim seems a little more natural now.
BTW, I usually keep copies of wily and sam around --- they are irritatingly useful at times. And I occasionally use emacs when I need a more interactive debugger for Perl or Ruby.