If you’ve been anywhere near professional programmers or enthusiastic hobbyists, you’ve heard the contentions over “best text editor,” in guises which range from gentle ribbing to outright flame wars.

I can’t weigh in on that. I have my preferences, but I’m a sort of text editor blasphemer. I love and hate all my editors — Vi, Emacs, Sublime, Notepad++, Pico, TextWrangler, all of them. You can’t have much of an opinion when you end up using four or more of them in one day, as the situation calls for.

But I do have one thing to say:

Results matter most.

There are Vi experts who never leave the command line and yet have an WPM efficiency that rivals lifelong copy editors. Others use involved IDEs to manage huge projects with relative ease. The point is that no one editor takes the cake in all situations and for all people.

It not only pays to be flexible per the situation, it also is useful to have a familiarity with more than one editor. You never know when you’ll need to trade in one tool for another, you’ll gain the respect of co-workers — and it’s good for your brain, too.

But if you really can’t stand the editor wars and want out of it all, there’s always Ed: