Twenty years ago, text editors were an indispensable programming tool, while IDEs were slow and clunky. Today, improvements in hardware have made IDEs much faster, and as a result, more developers choose to use them instead of text editors.
Many once-popular commercial text editors, including BRIEF, Polytron, KEDIT, Multi-Edit and SlickEdit, have either disappeared or are no longer actively developed. Only a few, like UltraEdit and TextMate, are still active commercial ventures. Instead, the most popular text editors of today are open source projects like Notepad ++, jEdit, Emacs and Vim.
