Learning how to navigate the program isn’t so challenging, but building the muscle memory of shortcuts and figuring out how best to customise the editor (which you really need to do to get the best from it) takes a lot longer. However, that said, Vim is incredibly stable, fast, and a joy to use for veteran command line aficionados and new, interested users alike.

Without a doubt, Vim makes for the steepest learning curve and perhaps one of the worst user experiences in our selection due to its complete lack of UI. It's also extremely customisable – to the extent that a command line program can be customised). You can use a number of keyboard shortcuts to speed up code editing, and even better, create customised commands to fit your own workflow. A command line software included natively with Linux operating systems and macOS and available for download for Windows, Vim is a favourite for many old-school programmers and keyboard enthusiasts. It's navigated entirely via the keyboard, making it much faster and more efficient, but only if you make the effort to learn how to operate it. Vim is perhaps the most contentious code editor in this list.

Windows code writer