Well, as a linux user that went from sysadmin-ing with some shell scripting into the role of full fledged developer over a number of years, I find vim to be my editor of choice. Never gave gnu-emacs a fair shot, but that's mostly due to the fact that both emacs and vi(m) have a fairly steep learning curve, and I haven't yet been able to take the plunge of learning another editing environment.

I've found vim to be highly extensible and customizable to meet my coding needs. With the proper plugins and customization of my .vimrc, it does everything that I need/want. Whenever I say to myself "hmmm, it would be really nice if I could do x in vim..." I do a little bit of googling and find out that I in fact CAN do that, I just didn't know how.

It definitely isn't a nice cozy WYSIWYG editor like you may find in an MS-Notepad or some of the other gui based editors (although gvim is much more user friendly if you have X installed). It does do all the things I need to help me write good code though. Good syntax highlighting, bracket jumping (for ensuring closing braces match opening braces), folding (hiding away portions of code into a "fold" that can be expanded/contracted), auto-indenting, regex style find/replace, shell interaction, split windows, diff, etc etc etc. Anything that you might think you want it to do, it most likely can do.

That being said, I use vim all day every day, and I most likely don't use more than 30% - 40% of the available power of the program. And I also find that I learn something new on an (almost) daily basis with it.

If you want a good GUI/WYSIWYG editor for perl, one of my ex-coworkers swore by Nedit. I used it a few times, but kept attempting to type vim commands at it and getting completely incorrect recults. I just find that after learning the power of a command driven interface, going back to point/click for what can be a 1 or 2 keystroke command is a big waste of time. It takes much longer to get to the mouse and move/click/move/click and then move hands back to the keyboard than just a couple of keystrokes.