not asking to get into an app namedropping war, but do alot of ppl use Notepad still? Kind of moved away from it years ago due to encoding, lack of some features etc
1) to strip formatting of text
2) to validate text. For example spotting an O or 0, | or l, etc. Its quite normal when dealing with user input to find configuration errors this way
3) Quick temporary paste buffer. Nice when jotting down phonecalls. Better than onenote since it opens quickly and ready to accept input. it never opens on some random page full of categorized notes.
That's all it's for though, for real work, real editors (meaning different editors for different tasks, because writing a long text in a code editor is kind of like insisting on using a chef knife for everything in the kitchen. Possible, but a bit silly)
On my machine, when there's an Emacs daemon running in the background (so no existing windows, which might make this process faster), opening a new window ("frame" in Emacs terminology) and then closing it again takes 165 milliseconds total.
Google gives various values for "human reaction time", but one of them is 200 milliseconds.
I'd say that that's pretty close.
Unless you need to save those 12 MB of memory that the Emacs daemon consumes.
You're free to use whatever editor you want, but I find the claim that "nothing else comes even close to just immediately giving you a textbox to spew characters into" a bit doubtful.