I literally don't know anyone who actually uses their DE-specific editor, though
They're like the BMW turn signals of the free software world. If you spend more than a couple hours a day editing, you use Vim and Emacs.
When I was using KDE I edited scripts and whatnot using Kate. Much later I have upgraded to Vim/Evil but having a good experience out of the box is fine. I also use mousepad in virtual xfce machines quite a lot.