I remain as surprised as last year about the prevalence of Notepad++. My circles do not intersect these users, I think.
This ofcourse being entirely subjective.
I love Emacs, but it took a deliberate, determined effort and time sacrificed to get productive in it, so that I didn't feel like I was handicapping myself.
How could you be more efficient using vim ? That's something I don't understand. I always suspect vim and emacs user saying it because it makes them feel like super programmer.
Start by reading this StackOverflow answer[0] titled, "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi."
Like that poster states, when you are using Vim correctly you are speaking a language as you are editing. You provide it an action and then you tell Vim what to apply the action to. This is usually either a motion command, or a text object. Combining these concepts allows you to have a level of expressiveness that non-modal editors cant easily replicate.
If you are just using Vim as you would use a non-modal editor you aren't going to see any gains. But if you embrace the "language" idea of Vim, learn to spend most of your time in command mode, and start combining actions + motions/text objects, you will start to see the real power of Vim.
"Joy explained that the terse, single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the display were a result of the slow 300 baud modem he used when developing the software and that he wanted to be productive when the screen was painting slower than he could think."
Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
An example to me, of how something pragmatic (wanted to avoid round trips) took on a life of its own.
The other thing is that, as a Windows developer, I spend a lot of time in my IDE. Whenever I try to use Emacs I quickly get sucked into the fact that the most productivity gains you get from it are when you use it for as much as possible, like OrgMode, reading emails, etc. It's advantage is that you can write elisp plugins to customize it for your workflow. As a standard corporate "textbox over data" developer, I have the full suite of Office and Visual Studio at my disposal, so I don't see any benefit to use Emacs. Also, Emacs on Windows is definitely a second rate experience. You can't launch a daemon process, and it requires setup to get copy/paste from the OS to work well.
Vim is great, and it works well on Windows, but again, most of the time I am editing code, it's in Visual Studio. If I need text manipulation or searching, it's a real loss to paste into Vim, and then have to switch over to remembering Vim commands.
I've come to the realization that tools like Vim, Sublime, and Emacs are awesome if you do the majority of your work on them. The more tasks you can pile into them, the less context switching you have, and more consistent experience you get.
On Windows, Notepad++ fits that niche perfectly, it uses the Windows commands, present a consistent interface, and it has the power to do powerful text manipulation when needed.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of Emacs is awesome: a configurable text editor using a dialect of Lisp? This is great, not only can I shape the tool to my needs, I also get to use a great language. However, at some point I do need to get my work done.
The editors and IDEs I do use likely all have very advanced text editing ability but I just never reach for them! Not once have I felt "now I'd really like 3 cursors". What are the normal use cases? Maybe I'm leaning on auto-formatting and refactorings more that lets me do things you would otherwise do with e.g regexes, multiple cursors?
But one thing it's really useful for is making bulk replacements on the fly without having to think too hard about what to match on. Instead of fiddling around trying to create a perfect regex to match the right cases, you can just step through instances of a loose match, choosing the right ones, and then make your edit.
Overall, for me it just feels like a much more intuitive ad-hoc style of editing.
Sublime = $70
Notepad++ = free
Just an anecdotal example, before JetBrains switched to their subscription model I was paying individual licenses for IDEA, PyCharm, and ReSharper. So if I had already spent over $300 p/a for IDE and tooling, another $70 will seem like an excess.