Since versions 1-5 of MS-DOS only came with the Edlin line-based editor, but were released on the IBM PC and compatibles, which had screen-based user I/O, my feeling is that most users wouldn't have bothered with it. Microsoft's MS-DOS Editor (edit.com) and IBM's E, didn't exist until the 1990s.
My question is, what were the most popular text editors during the 1980s era? Did DOS programmers gravitate toward certain editors over others?
There were many editors available for DOS, both standalone and included in development environments. I suspect that most developers using IDEs used their IDE’s built-in editor; those were perhaps the most popular editors for programmers. Some programming environments provided simple editors as part of their example code. Note however that DOS IDEs weren’t anything like modern IDEs, and their main benefit was integrated debugging and perhaps online help rather than advanced editing capabilities.
Many file managers included simple text editors; I don’t know how many people used them for general text editing, let alone programming.
Among standalone editors, a couple spring to mind as being popular back in the 80s:
Many word processors were usable as plain text editors; this includes the heavyweights of the 80s (WordStar, WordPerfect etc.). A cut-down version of WordPerfect was sold as WordPerfect Editor in the 90s. A number of shareware word processors were also popular as text editors:
There were many free text editors available too, such as Sled which I used for a long time.
WordStar was one of the earliest and most popular word processing programs for CP/M and MS-DOS. One of the key features for a lot of people was the non-document mode. This did a few important things:
While the WordStar document format is nearly lost, the keystrokes live on. Turbo Pascal, which worked quite well as a text editor even if you weren't editing Pascal code, used the WordStar commands, as did quite a few other programs. For people who learned to program in that era, WordStar commands live on.
I eventually moved on to Vedit, and I still use Vedit today. I configured it to use WordStar commands, and they are second nature, as they should be after 40 years or so. Control-Q R top of file, Control-Q C bottom of file, Control-K B start of block, etc.
My favorite editor as a professional programmer in the DOS enthronement was E. The OP is mistaken in saying that E was not available until the 90s. True, it was not included with PC DOS until 1993, but it had been an in-house editor at IBM for at least a decade prior to that. They initially commercialized it as Personal Editor in 1982. It was upgraded in 1984 and rebranded as E.
What I liked about it was the flexibility. You could open multiple panes on your DOS screen (for example 1x3 panes or 2x2). Each pane could contain different files, or different views of the same file. It was a fairly small program that you could easily run from floppy along with whatever text files you needed to be editing.
I remember that in the late 1980s Multi-Edit for MS-DOS was quite popular.
If you came from CP/M then you were familiar with Wordstar.
Turbo Pascal used the same keys as Wordstar, so it was also a popular editor (as you can already see from the comments) for everything that was plain text on MS-DOS.
Lexicon
Lexicon was a text editor / word processor MS-DOS program that was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and Russia at the end of 1980s and in 1990s. Some estimate that Lexicon was illegally installed on 95% of all Russian PCs. The last version for MS-DOS was 1.4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon_(program)
Word & Deed
My favorite text editor, until Windows 7 rendered it unusable, was PC-Write 3.01, a shareware program for which I purchased the manual.
I don't know how many other people used it, but it ran quickly on the 4.77 MHz 8088 I owned when I first bought it, and it ran lightning-fast on later machines.
WordPerfect was the leading word processor from roughly 1986 to 1993, with 60% market share at its peak. (The previous leading word processor was WordStar.) It was available for many other operating systems as well. Corel still releases new versions, and it’s hung on with lawyers, largely because its page numbering is still standard for citing court cases. A botched release for Windows let Microsoft Word overtake WordPerfect as the market leader. (Some Wikipedia user falsely, and without giving a citation, attributes this to Microsoft supposedly not giving WordPerfect Corp. a copy of the Windows API.)
It was so well-known that a parody, NerdPerfect, sold 50,000 copies in 1987–88. Released by VaporSoft, Inc., whose slogan was “Software before its time”—well, see it for yourself. (One of the creators followed up to that video.)
I have always preferred the Norton Editor. Over the years I have investigated many other text editors and I have always returned to the Norton Editor.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Norton Editor ║
║ A Programmer's Full-Screen Editor ║
║ Version 1.3C ║
║ (C) Copyright 1988, S. Reifel & Co ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
At 32439 bytes it is a small program that loads (and runs) very fast. It does not come with too many whistles or bells. It has all the right features to be productive:
Many have already mentioned WordStar but no one has mentioned Galaxy, which I used extensively in the late 80s (87-89). I found it better than WordStar, as (to me) it seemed easier to use and more intuitive.
If I recall correctly (and I may not be), I seem to remember Galaxy having a better UI, with respect to the presentation of the actual document.
Whereas WordStar documents would be riddled with ridiculous tags used for formatting (i.e. ^PS, ^PB, and ^PY for underline, bold and italics respectively), Galaxy represented such formatting by highlighting/shading the characters. Underlining was also shown visually, rather than with tags.
As an illustration, the heading of a document in WS would look like this, taken from page 7-5 of the WS 3.3 Reference manual:
This image shows Galaxy bolding in bright white and italic as green:
I used Galaxy on an amber monochrome monitor, so I don't recall having ever seen this colour highlighting. However, you must admit that the formatting was a lot less intrusive - not quite WYSIWYG, but certainly not littered with tags that made a document look like raw HTML.
I can't remember much more why I loved Galaxy so much, but I distinctly remember loathing WordStar, after having used it for three months to produce a report. Once I discovered Galaxy, I was hooked. I continued using it until I discovered, in 1989, that the university had a room full of Macintosh SE computers and then switched to Word for the full WYSIWYG.
There is a video here of a chap demonstrating the Galaxy, DOS applications - Galaxy word processor (shareware), which is where I got the above screenshot from.
The text editor within Borland Sidekick was great. At the end of the 80s, I was developing a Lisp-based add-in for AutoCAD (around 500 kloc of Lisp) and having a TSR editor at my fingertips was a huge advantage; I could load up a file, edit it, save it and reload it into AutoCAD without having to reload AutoCAD.
One weirdness was that it used the same memory region that AutoCAD used for its frame buffer, after exiting Sidekick, the AutoCAD display often had bits of noise in it - but nothing that was permanent. I got a lot of use out of that really cheap license.
I started on PC-DOS in 1985.
The word processor first used was MultiMate and then Word - the DOS version. I was a programmer so not really writing letters etc. Then I used Windows 1 Write
Most of my writing was code for which I used
The point of this and other answers to note is that there were many popular editors and no one dominated (From magazines I suspect WordStar was the most popular which was then overtaken by WordPerfect) There are also two types of editors one for writing letters etc and then others for programming.
See texteditors.org for breif descriptions of many of them.
I used to use edit.com that came with MS-DOS 6.22 and looked a lot like Q-Basic. I also used WordStar for MS-DOS a little bit but mainly edit.com because it was easily accessible.
QBASIC /EDITOR.
May 1, 2023 at 12:53
As a young teen I was using XTree and later XTree Gold on my 286 from 1989 onward.
It was a file commander but had an Editor as well, which was very handy. I spend many hours "shortening" text files to save space on my 20 Mbyte MFM drive, before I learned about block sizes, and then PKARC followed by ZIP compression.
Personally, I used Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Using the same keystrokes saved a lot of time when context switching. Turbo Pascal was one of my first serious programming languages. I Wrote a custom cost accounting system using it. I Also wrote a mortgage analyzer in Basic on a Kaypro 10 and IIRC the editor uses the same keystrokes as Wordstar. Wordstar was my first text editor because that is what I used in school. Since it was used at school in the early 80s everyone I knew was using Wordstar.
I will also note that since edlin was the only editor shipped with MS-DOS in the 90s while supporting Windows I would walk people through editing configuration files using edlin. That is not an activity for the faint of heart.
Microsoft word was available in 1983. I don't know if it was the most popular, it was used by some establishments. 
