I'm going to admit it. I abhor "vim" or whatever it wants to call itself now. Linux memes about it have ensured it, that damn "colon-cue" that just wasn't funny, sorry. Don't care about that LISP-influenced other one either, although I wanted to learn Racket. Too bad "emacs" wants Common LISP instead of Scheme. [/rant]
I have no favorite text editor. GEdit was good enough for years but it's very slow and barely configurable, especially the colors, and their descendants like Pluma have become even slower. On XFCE cannot disable the rolling animation while scrolling the pages which I think looks dumb and is driving me up a tree. Mousepad has come a long way and I admit it's really the only thing I like from XFCE v4.18 -- except the animation. Xed is pretty good but hogs more space than Pluma on the screen and ignores "gsettings" to kill the animations, or at least it's unpredictable on GNOME. Otherwise probably the top program I use in any Linux OS with MATE I have installed is Pluma.
Kate is pretty good but with a lot of visual distractions and KDE keep changing it more and more so I have to forego using it. On any KDE installation I have I use KWrite whenever possible because it's somewhat less annoying. I use it for composing regular text documents. This program has the weirdest behavior for word-wrap I have ever seen. Cannot begin a paragraph in a story with a tab or with spaces off the left-hand margin, or that's how
the whole paragraph is indented. Nope, don't like it. Top pro is the ability to change the syntax colors although that could be really deep.
I also use Geany but it has a really nasty
CTRL+R
keystroke "set in the factory" that I have never found in another text editor. This and Featherpad also have the
HOME
and
END
keys behavior that go against what I'm used to. It could be handy in Geany to have the "Line wrapping" option per document in case one forgets to set it when not using it to edit source code. Ugh I dislike this program in "dark mode" however. I have the XZM module for Porteus MATE, and installed for EndeavourOS MATE but because the whole either OS is in "dark mode" Geany is also. I would like to change it but I can't.
L3afpad is good for writing down something quickly but that's it. On Slackware-based distros this has a major irritation while scrolling through a text document. Don't do it with the arrow keys! It was better in "dark mode" on Archbang! I had to use this program in Knoppix as well, had to help someone else test a 32-bit Windows program created with QB64.
I should have used Nano more often but the keystrokes are too weird. I'm too used to M$-world keystrokes for dealing with the clipboard, and I will really have to deal without word-wrap. But it's a nice little editor. Don't tell me "emacs" or "vim" is better. (shuts eyes and covers ears with hands)
Almost forgot I did venture into Joe's Editor on Slackware. That's even weirder with the Wordstar keystrokes I learned nearly 40 years back but I have forgotten! Away from Midnight Commander it was a shock to see a "terminal application" being fired up but that's before I discovered a music-creation program called Adlibtracker II.
Cannot take seriously a program like Liri Text which does
not use a monospaced font for the text and has no option for the user to change it.
Also tried Text Adept, Notepad++ (on Windows), Notepadqq and others based on Scintilla but I just wanted out of that overblown library. What attracted me about Text Adept was the customizability with Lua but it didn't respond to many of my efforts which put me off very much and the whole editor as it was originally set up was counterintuitive. Notepadqq's options are a joke, instead I almost considered using its "namesake" through Wine. Long ago I installed "Lua for Windows v5.1" package which came with SciTE. It was nice to be able to run that interpreter inside the editor. LOL I knew nothing about Lua programming back then, it had to wait a few years later.
(Sorry TL;DR and noticed a response from six years ago...)