Well, I started with "vi" on my very first shell account (a SunOS 4.x box, back in 1995). No idea what exact version of vi it was, but I didn't have any colors or visual mode, or anything like that. Soon after that, I installed Slackware and started using "vi" there as well. And since I completely stayed away from Windows all these years (except when required for a job), I just kept using vi or vim.
Somewhere along the way I got the crazy idea to swap the Escape and CapsLock keys, using either xmodmap or its console equivalent (e.g. wsconsctl in OpenBSD). That made things a lot more comfortable...
Speaking of OpenBSD, their /usr/bin/vi program is a slightly enhanced version of nvi, because it allows you to split the screen and have several text windows displayed at once. I didn't even realize this until one of the developers mentioned it on openbsd.misc:
our vi has multiple windows.
:E new_file
then ^W to move from file to file.
:viusage
will give you some help.
Granted, the <Control-W> thing is explicitely mentioned in the manpage, but it doesn't explain the differences between the :e and :E commands. All it says is this:
[Ee][dit][!] [+cmd] [file]
[Ee]x[!] [+cmd] [file]
Edit a different file.But anyway, it's a nice feature to have (although I guess you could get similar functionality with tmux windows also).
I also know the basics of "ed", just in case - because at least /bin/ed is statically linked and might be the only thing available to edit files with if /usr is fubar, or the dynamic linker is broken. Well it's not like it's that much different from vi anyway...
Back in my home computer days, I mainly used Notepad on my Amiga 500 (it's the default editor there, but not identical to Windows Notepad). There was also uemacs (microemacs) on one of the Workbench floppies, but I didn't bother with it. I think AmigaBasic (the version shipped with Workbench 1.3) had its own IDE though. I played around with that, but didn't do much except write some character generators and other tools for our tabletop AD&D games.
Before that I had an Amstrad CPC and there of course just used the ROM BASIC screen editor. It works quite well, especially when you switch to 80-column mode (just typing "mode 2" at the prompt did the trick). Their BASIC dialect (Locomotive BASIC) was also fairly powerful, giving you access to many graphics and sound functions without needing to go through the PEEK/POKE mumbo-jumbo. That machine also shipped with CP/M disks, which contained an "ed" program but I didn't really bother with that.