I'm using TextMate on Mac OS X, which I am very happy with, but I would also like a nice editor on my Ubuntu box. So I have been looking for something like TextMate, which is very simplistic in its interface but very powerful beneath that surface, with a plugin system and all.
Is there any similar editor for Linux?
GEdit can be customized pretty good. Not as good as Textmate but it's very usable.
How to make the best of ubuntu text editor gedit
Update: There is even a github repo with tons of extensions for GEdit: GMate
I've been rather fond of jEdit (http://www.jedit.org) for anything that I wouldn't otherwise use Eclipse for. It's pretty lightweight, has a good plug-in collection and a nicely-integrated management system for installing and updating the plugins. It's written in Java so it should run anywhere you can get a JRE going (I have it running on Ubuntu, Mac OS X and WinXP). I've found it a decent editor for Java, Javscript, HTML/XML/other-ML, CSS, and plenty others.
To be fair, I continue to prefer XEmacs for Perl development (I think it had the best parser of Perl syntax outside of Perl itself), and I use Eclipse for larger-scale projects in Java. But jEdit gets a lot of keyboard-time.
You can learn Vi, which is a bit frustrating at first but makes you more productive in the long run.
Using the project plugin makes Vim a little bit more like TextMate, with an IDE-like explorer.
This thread contains a good deal of helpful information and links on VIM. I personally use VIM for all my editing, and find that it makes me more productive than any other IDE or editor that I am familiar with. But it has a bit of a learning curve.
Google'ing for "linux textmate" returns quite a few results. Must be a popular wish.
I second Gedit. I've used it quite a bit when write Java code for school and also some Python and Bash scripts.
If you look around, there are many tutorials about "tricking" out Gedit:
Emacs, with its infinite extendability (via. Emacs Lisp) is most like TextMate in its ability to be modified for any purpose. A big plus is that the modification can be done on the fly, by writing new functions and loading them into Emacs while it is running. It has "modes" (packages of syntax highlighting, indentation, shortcuts and snippets) for most languages and many of the big frameworks (i.e. there is a mode specifically for Rails). Emacs is cross platform - it runs on Windows, OS X and, of course, Linux (along with many other more obscure operating systems).
That all said, Emacs has a steep learning curve. The key bindings and general way of doing things takes a while to get used to. However, this is the case with any powerful piece of software, including TextMate and some of the other editors that have been mentioned (vi, I'm looking at you). And the work is worth the effort; Emacs has features that will make everything you do faster. Take the time, print out a "cheat sheet," read about useful tweaks to the defaults and give Emacs a try.
Geany comes by default in ubuntu, light weight yet feature rich.
Add an alias to your .bash_aliases file to call your favorite graphical editor
# Frustration Aliases
alias vi='gvim'
In my case I like p-dinking around in the shell but it is nice to use the gui functions too... ;-) I type the default "vi" command and "gvim" the graphical version of Vim is started.