it really depends on how confident the programmer is and what your system dictates. new users may benifit from active states xplatform perl gui,visual perl. it has extensive online help and code completion. but it's commercial and costs $$US.

Others of the gnu persuasion (who would rather spend money on hardware) require stable, active and well rounded editing tools such as Pico, ed, nano, emacs, vi, vim etc.

for me vim wins for a number of reasons. when I move from obsd->linux, linux->windows, windows->cygwin, windows->ssh->obsd etc... I use use ...

• same vim editor
  
• access to perl syntax highlighting and other vim perl scripts
  
• scriptable vim using perl
  
• light footprint ~ 3Mb depending on version
  
• gui or cli versions
  
• ability to shell out
  

for me it allows me to leverage my editor skills on many platforms, harness the energy of the perl/vim community with scripts and customize my editors the way I want it, compile in different features. Emacs has pretty much the same capability - vim is my choice for the reasons outlined.

as with perl, when using editors TMTOWTDI. You can use different editors for different situations (vi for quick changes, vim for developing, emacs for development, ed for updates .... get the idea?