Thank you for all the above good input. My impression, from reading, is that deals like vi and vim are not particularly easy to use for the type of applications I had in mind.

Bob

I would recommend learning vi. Although it is daunting to start with, it is very fast to write code in once you know what you are doing. It is also standard across all the different nixes, and any *nix system you use will have vi available.

Gvim is a graphical version of vi. It has mouse support, and tends to look somewhat better.

There are lots of tutorials on how to use vi on the internet.

--Ian

hate to drag this thread out, but I agree.... VI or VIM is classic unix text editor. Its probably a good one to at least be familiar with because it will most likely be on any unix type os system youll ever encounter. In my unix systems class at school we were forced to learn it.

leafpad

Leafpad is the equivalent of notepad.
Gedit also is a good basic editor.
For Programming: Notepad++? SciTE would be the equivalent.

Note that in many of these, there are "modes."

In Kate, if you go to Tools-->Mode, you can choose among various programming language and other modes. Under Mode-->Markup, there is an HTML mode.

In Gedit, you can go to View-->Highlight Mode, and find an HTML mode.

Some of the other GUI editors I'm not so familiar with, but, if you hunt around, you may find surprising and useful options.

I also agree with the advice to learn how to use vi, at least well enough to do basic editing (navigate a file, insert and delete text, save a file). No matter what distro you are using, there is likely to be some version of vi, so that, if you have to do some sort of rescue, basic knowledge of vi is extremely useful.

An eight year old thread,
Has risen from the dead.
Halleluyah!!!