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.

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.

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.