The compelling differentiator is that all the features are easily discoverable, you don't need to read a manual before you know how to save/quit/search/replace/use tabs/undo/redo/macros/etc.

Is there a point in comparing CLI-based, primarily-*nix-userbase editors with a GUI-based primarily-windows-userbase editor?

Of course, to signal your leetness.

Standard Windows hotkeys, fast, buttons.

Here's why I like it:

For a considerable time in my professional life I was forced to use Windows. I would still have access to Linux VMs, in which I spent most of my time, using vim as the editor but whenever I wanted to take quick notes, sanitize text, stash away some info I need in work etc., I'd just use the notepad on Windows.

Then I found Notepad++. The UX is just so great (though I never figured out how to delete all the line ending spaces and it's sometimes nagging me).

So I love both Vim and Notepad++, different use cases. Different reasons.

> though I never figured out how to delete all the line ending spaces and it's sometimes nagging me

Do you mean extra spaces at the end of line? If yes then select the lines, go to:

Edit - Blank Operation - Trim Trailing Space

I use vim and geany and code::blocks and np++ for different things at different times.

geany, codeblocks, and np++ are all scintilla, so what I am really saying is I use both "something like vim or emacs" AND scintilla, and there is no dichotomy.

And what is "something like vim or emacs"? The two are nothing like each other.

Anyone who used either vim or emacs already knows why they do so, and already knows that none of the reasons anyone will say they like any normal editor will apply. Everything anyone says will either be something vim or emacs already has their own answer for, or will be things they actively don't want.

Question seems somewhere between disingenuous to inexplicable. I would say rather than an actual request for information, it was just to say "I like vim or emacs", except "I like vim or emacs" makes no sense because they are not substitutions for each other.

Unless you're looking for a compelling reason to switch. For example, I use VS Code sometimes because of its markdown preview pane. That's not available in emacs or vim (to my knowledge).

Does emacs work as well as notepad++ on windows?

emacs works great on windows. I'm not sure if there are things notepad++ does that emacs can't but I've never had any windows-specific issues with emacs.

Notepad++ is literally a better version of notepad.exe. I would not consider using it for anything serious though.

It depends what your "serious" work is. I have used it to edit well over 300 million words of text, reformatting scripts to add tagging etc, large scripts of complex regex to data clean (although nothing I know of beats TextCrawler for that task), even writing code in several languages - though of course a proper ide is more useful for many coding tasks. VS Code for example absolutely chokes on large files. Sublime does an ok job - but not one I can rely on for larger batch jobs. NPP excels, and I can quickly do thousands of changes on thousands of large files quickly. NPP also has many plugins (like Sublime etc), and its utility depends on them as much as the other text editors do.

Not really, if you already know vim or emacs well enough.

You don't need to worry about modes or plugins for language syntax highlighting for most file types as it's built in.

From what I've seen it's mostly baby duck syndrome and that's totally ok. I am also fully "baby ducked" into vscode, so I get it

> baby duck syndrome

Today I learned something new.