Hello everyone, I know that most of you will hate me for asking a question that has already been asked 1 billion times around the net, but I hope to find someone who knows something I didn't discover yet

On Windows, my favourite text editor is Notepad++. For those who didn't try it, it's based on Scintilla, it does many things like vertical selection (also typing the same thing on more lines at once), it supports drag & drop very well, it allows to specify custom languages and within certain limits a custom behaviour for each of them (so I can keep tabs for Ruby code and use spaces in Python for example).
I can fully personalize shortcuts, register macros, move lines up or down or duplicate them, cut a whole line or just drop it. I can sort selection (case sensitive or not), I can grep by regex, use a bunch of plugins, compare files, quickly access open files from keyboard shortcuts.
I can also drop trailing spaces whenever I want, change encodings and a lot more things that I use regularly. I even prefer it to Visual Studio + Visual Assist.

Ok, speaking about Linux (or even Mac OS X), what would be an alternative, other than using Wine?
I tried:
SciTE: crashes a lot (at least on Mandriva), editing configurations is worse than getting kicked in the butt, I can't move lines up or down and it seems there's a limit on the number of files open at the same time.

Kate: it seems the best so far, but it lacks many feaures I need. I can't ctrl+L (cut a whole line), and a few more things. I could find the option to automatically trim spaces, but apparently there is no command to do that whenever I want.

Blue Fish: the interface is quite heavy, it is likely to get confused and mix line endings, syntax colorizing is not so nice, and all in all I think it's best fit for web programmers. And try to do a conversion on line ending characters if you don't have dos2unix installed...

Vim: a lot of shortcuts with no GUI alternative; I hate to switch between insert and command modes.

KWrite: lol

Code::Blocks: a good one, but it still misses moving lines, and it's not very stable. Also, it's language-specific.

TextMate: it seems nice, but same, I couldn't find a way to convert line endings. Also, changing encodings is supported, but I didn't see an option to force another encoding without touching the actual data.

Sorry, for whining a bit, but I really wish there was a powerful and lightweight editor on my favourite OS. If anyone has any hint, I appreaciate any reply. If anyone has enough motivation to port Notepad++ to Linux (many good fellows out there would be glad), I can put some of my spare time into that and try to give a contribute.

I agree that kate is good - have you tried gedit?

Actually vim has a GUI interface - which is gvim.

It might not be what you you're after, but just FYI - there's also emacs.
The ultimate programmer's editor which probably contains every feature
a developer might ever want. If it doesn't, one can always add it.
Some people joke that emacs is "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor" LOL.

I use emacs and kate. I will not pretend to understand emacs fully, but it suits my simple needs at the cli.

Thanks, I'll look into it. Showing this discussion to a coworker, he also told me about xemacs, I'll give a look to that one as well. However, I think I'll take some time whenever I can to try to port Notepad++, although I heard it might be worth to rewrite it from scratch.
I'll keep on following this post in case someone else has other interesting thing to say.

Is there any specific programming language you have in mind or just a general programmer's editor?
I don't think there are many more general-purpose programmer's editors out there.
AFAIK, people tend to use either Kate/Gedit or Emacs/Vi(m) for programming.

Kate/Gedit are easy to start with but, as you have noticed, may lack some programming features.
With Emacs/vim you need to spend some time learning them, but then it definitely pays off.

I use geany as both text editor and IDE, it's light enough for that. It is also quite customizable. What I really wanted and needed was syntax highlighting, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an editor with good syntax highlighting ... this can be customized too on geany.

@sicamorex: yes, I need something to do Ruby and Python, and that is capable of showing XML and YAML. I also need an editor for C++, although Code::Blocks is quite nice at that (but not handy enough for a quick fix in a file that comes with a makefile instead of a project). Also, something that can put some colouring in bash scripts, windows batches and ini files, makefiles and a couple proprietary languages we use here at work. Colouring diff files is nice too... and a few more things meybe. I guess this make my ideal editor not so language specific

@H_TeXMeX_H: thanks, I'll look into that one as well!