Mac just crashed, and I have a Windows box that's actually more beefed up but I'm not about to go that route, especially because I'm using git and rails. So Ubuntu is the next step I guess.
I was using Textmate which was exceptional. Looks like I have to move on for a while.
What editor do you use with Ubuntu? Please don't say vi or nano.
I prefer gedit: good syntax highlighting, tabbed interface, no frills.
Gedit is no textmate, but it gets the job done. Scribe tries to be textmate for linux: http://scribes.sourceforge.net/
I use Emacs, because it is available (and behaves identically) on every imaginable platform (Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, Mac, VMS, MVS, etc.). It has everything - and more.
I use Geany, my fallback is gedit.
I will emphasise that Geany's extremely lightweight, and even then I run it with most features turned off. I use it on both Ubuntu and Windows. Above gedit it has slightly smarter indentation and highlighting, and better handling for multiple source files.
It's available in Ubuntu apt-get install geany. There are also 14 optional plugins packaged in Ubuntu for Lucid 10.04.1.
To copy mostly verbatim the features of Geany:
Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK2 runtime libraries. Some basic features of Geany:
Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. More generally, it should run on every platform, which is supported by the GTK libraries. Only the Windows port of Geany is missing some features.
Some how I have found gedit always attached meta characters to the end of every line to my files. Once I edited the bash file and went mad trying to debug random errors that kept popping up. Then a friend of mine (fedora user) suggested I check my bash file. For this purpose I used VIM and to my surprise I noticed ^M character in every line! So my suggestion to you, if you are interested in programming and stuff, use VIM... It is amazing how simple it is to use and you will not be worried about your editor working hard for you and putting in extra characters where they don't belong.. :)
vim! Just kidding :) I know it's not just a text editor but I use netbeans. It's great for web development and has syntax highlighting for most languages. And it should tie in with git.