I’ve used most of the traditional editors. By “traditional” I mean editors like ed, ex, vi/vim, Emacs, Acme, and even—back in the day—brief. One editor I’ve never tried is Sam. Sam, like Acme, was written by Rob Pike so if you know anything at all about the Unix milieu it’s entitled to automatic respect.
You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s reportedly the editor of choice for Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup, and others. That’s a lot of world class programmers voting for Sam.
If you want to get a flavor of what working with Sam is like, Matthew D. Miller has a post that recounts his experiences with it. Miller is not really a Sam user but he wanted to see what it was like. You can read the post to get his impressions but the thing that stands out to me is how mouse-centric it is. That’s not surprising because Pike is a believer in the superiority of the mouse over the keyboard for speed and efficiency.
We Emacsers (and Vi users for that matter) are having none of that and will forever forswear the mouse in favor of the keyboard but there’s room for everyone. You can even use the mouse with Emacs and Vim if you like.
Regardless, if you’ve ever wondered what using Sam was like, take a look at Miller’s post to get a feeling for it. If it sounds good to you, download it and try it out. You can always come back to the one true editor.