Those GUI editors really make me mad when I type <esc>:wq and it messes up my text...

Still Kate. I have to try Emacs or Vim some day.

geany and kate, great text editors, but vim still rocks linux world, i vote for vim

So many nice ones to choose from.
nano for cli
leafpad or scite for gui

The ageless one is my choice, both on UNIX, BSD, Linux, and Windows, and that is GNU Emacs. I do use MANY editors just to keep up on them. Naturally I know Vim. For routine editing where a Notepad equivalent works fine for routine copying, cutting, and pasting, I use either Mousepad or Leafpad. When I want automatic text wrapping, I sometimes also use NEdit, also known as Nirvana. But when it comes right down to it, there is no editing task with plain text that I cannot handle very well with GNU Emacs, and that also includes handling of news - which I usually do directly with GNU Emacs gnus, and sometimes even Email with gnus. Kitchen sink approaches are fine when they work as well as Emacs does.

People complain about the key bindings in Emacs, but I have never seen a more extensible or easily customized tool. I can make Emacs look like Vi if I want to, or EDT, or Wordstar... or on and on... Needless to say, I can make it look like my own creation, too, and I sometimes configure it to suit things I am doing often. Most flexible tool out there. I know that there are many good text editors. For me, Emacs is that, but it is a lot more than that, it is a time saver and a tool chest full of tools. It truly is almost an application suite because of the extensible Emacs Lisp environment in which it runs.

Jed... I do use others, but Jed has been my favorite for
a long time.

I can't make my mind: I voted for emacs, but vim is very close

i like leafpad its easy.but i picked Nedit.

Emacs, baby! I like my automatic Lisp indentations without having to wrestle for them, thank you very much!

I needed to vote KATE here it's not quite the project (something that isn't quit an IDE that lets you make a list of commands for each project you have) that I am working on right now but it is almost the same concept so It's IMOH almost perfect for big jobs. For edit one file on its own I use vim.

Yep, you should really add Geany. It's like SciTE but much better. I switched from SciTE to Geany and don't look back anymore.

Vim forever. If I need a GUI, Kate is great.

I don't really waste much time in a text editor. If I've to do some quick editing and I happen to have a terminal open, vim. Any editing that takes a bit longer, I prefer Kate. In terms of flexibility, jEdit can be really powerful with some plugins.

For now, I will choose Kate just because it is the one I've been using a "lot" lately. I say a "lot", because I don't actually program anything with any text editor lately

I voted for vim but cream (a vim wrapper) is also an excellent text editor. gedit a close second.

Well, when it comes to raw text editing power, I'm going to have to say Vim. Although, GNU Emacs is definitely also one of my favorite pieces of software, and usually open on at least one of my computers. I have used jEdit quite a bit in the last few months as well, and it strikes me as a more organized and prettier Emacs in terms of its extensibility. Still, Geany is a very nice up-and-coming lightweight IDE with some cool integration features (scintilla, vte, tags, &c). So many good choices!

Oh well, as it turns out I have a text-editor fetish anyway.