Since I've switched to Linux I still can't seem to find a text editor I like. I used notepad++ in windows with a dark background theme and can't seem to find anything that matches it.

Kate is the closest thing but the issue is that it is DOG SLOW over NFS. I do *ALL* my coding ver NFS, I don't like storing anything locally, it's all on a central server that I control and gets backed up nightly etc, has raid and so on... just easier to manage. For stuff like websites I edit straight on the server so I can hit refresh and see my results right away, it just works nicely that way.

Kate actually works well in terms of features, but it has this nasty thing where for every single character you type, it writes data to disk. This makes it so typing is extremely slow unless the file is local, and even then, it has to be a rather fast hard drive like a SSD. So That option is out the window. If you hold down a key you'll see what I mean. There used to be a checkbox in option to disable this swap file thing, but that checkbox no longer does anything.

Using Gedit now, but it just feels so, primitive.. the search is really finicky as well, like half the time you hit enter for next result but it actually hits enter on the text, or other times it just loses your spot and makes you bounce all over, it's too touchy. Not a fan.

There are others but they seem so primitive as well. Some seem like they're basically a GUIized version of command line ones. Reminds me of DOS. Vim and such is fine if I'm sshed into a server and want to do a quick edit, but for actual serious coding I want a GUI where I can quickly scroll around, select/cut/copy/paste text, move between documents etc.

Anything else I could try? I don't want a full blown IDE, I just want a good all round tabbed text editor that has syntax highlighting and half decent search and other basic features like that. Idealy one that wont try to do anything weird over NFS like Kate does.

KWrite possibly?

Notepad++ uses the same codebase as SciTE.
I like Geany, I have used Gedit/Pluma and SciTE.

your system default is just fine
Gedit for gnome
Kate for KDE
then of course there es Emacs

http://www.sublimetext.com/

P.S. It can me a hassle to install some plugins, but most of them can be easily installed with Package Control: https://sublime.wbond.net/

"vi" is pretty much THE standard text editor on a *nix system. That, and "emacs" too.

Many programmers would say that vi is much faster and more powerful, and GUI's are what you use when you don't know the specific editor program very well. A new user of vi will be very slow and klutzy. But there is absolutely nothing like watching an experienced vi'er fly around through files, having things already edited before you even realize what they intentions were. But to each his own. If you like GUI's, there's nothing wrong with that.

Both Kate and Gedit look quite plain at first glance, but, if you look into the menus, you will find settings to enable various profiles.

In Kate, for example, under Tools you will find "Mode," "Indentation," and "Highlighting" features for various coding and markup languages. Gedit has similar capabilities, but I can't remember off the top of my head exactly where they are on the menu.

I actually liked Kate as far as features go, problem is, it is useless over NFS or other higher latency storage because it writes to the network for every single key stroke. (I verified this with a packet sniffer). You can see just how slow it is if you hold down a key. So if you type fast, forget it.

Gedit I'm just not a fan of the search which is something I use a lot in programming, it seems really finicky, you can't really jump to a search term and hit a key for the next term, it just starts to type into the document. It's just awkward to use.

Going to give Sublime and other suggestions a try too, open to other suggestions as well.

I think I saw something about that in another thread, but I can't find it. I'll take a shot in the dark here.

In Kate, go to Settings-->Configure Kate-->Editor Component-->Open/Save-->Advanced and click "Disable swap files syncing" and see whether that makes a difference.

Yeah tried that. See, that option USED to work as I had the same issue in the past but was able to fix it, but it does not work any more. But that's exactly what is causing the issue, it's the syncing.

I could probably download the source and fix it but I don't know how I would go about "installing" it back into the system so that I still have it show up in the GUI as an option to "open with" and what not and also not conflict with the one installed through apt-get.

Been using Kate for years myself and love it...odd...never noticed that it was slow in the slightest. Perhaps something else at work there...

Are you using it over NFS or other remote storage, it's only slow if it's a remote storage. You can notice this if you hold down a key. Raid 10 is not so bad, but over a VPN it will be slow if there's slight network latency going on (testing it today from work and it's actually usable but some days it's not, depends how much network activity is going on my home network, torrents etc). The issue is that it writes data to disk for each character that is typed so it's very noticeable on high latency storage. There used to be a checkbox to disable this file swapping thing but the checkbox no longer does anything. It's really too bad since out of all the editors I tried I still like Kate better. I need to see if I can figure a way to fix that. I tried to find the source but they don't seem to offer it without having to setup a whole blown development environment using git. I just want the source!

The project repository... https://projects.kde.org/projects/kd...ate/repository

or, latest version: http://anongit.kde.org/kate/kate-latest.tar.gz

Notepad ++ is more geared toward coding in various languages. Do you need an editor for a language? LightTable comes to mind.

I realized this morning that maybe you have uncovered a bug. Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report.