In the editor wars, I know of three large camps: The emacs crowd, the vi (vim) crowd, and the "whatever GUI flavor of the week" crowd. Both the emacs and vi crowds like the fact that their editors are extremely powerful and customizable. Both of these camps invest a bit of time learning the tricks of their editors, and committing elaborate sequences to muscle memory so that complex tasks become automatic. Both editors are available on virtually any distribution of almost any OS from the past 25 years or so. Certainly DOS, Windows, any flavor of Linux, Unix, or MacOS don't present a problem.
There are some other editors that are virtually as powerful and customizable as vi or emacs, but most of these aren't as easily available on all platforms. Some charge money, others are bundled with an unusual operating system.
The "whatever GUI flavor of the week" people tend to switch between editors, and don't use very powerful commands. For example, they mostly don't search and replace using regular expressions.
The emacs and vi users may argue the merits of their respective editors, but the arguments are somewhat pointless, as they never end up convincing someone to switch sides. Each side has too much invested it learning the way their editor works.
I won't tell you whether I prefer emacs or vi, but I will say that I've been using the same editor for around 25 years, on a boatload of hardware platforms and operating systems. I've used it on a genuine (hardware) VT-220, as well as on xterm windows, and various other terminal windows. I can set the colors to whatever I want. I can program it to do anything I'd want an editor to do, and more. I think it was worth the effort to learn one editor well. And I can stumble around in the other major editor, as well as any GUI editor, too.
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