Finding a decent editor on Ubuntu
As a recent Ubuntu convert I wanted a simple, yet useful editor for programming. I was looking for something with a tabbed interface, syntax highlighting and sessionsaving for starters.
My thoughts immediately landed on vim, even before I installed Ubuntu, so it was one of the first editors I tried. Vim is powerful, no doubt about that, but it just didn't satisfy my needs. After a week or so of real usage, I realized that modal editors just isn't my cup of tea. I tried evim (easy vim), but I didn't like that either, basic stuff like <Ctrl>+<Left/Right> didn't work etc.
I also tried jEdit, but no go. In the end I discovered that the included text editor in GNOME, gedit, in fact has support for almost everything I needed. And the stuff it didn't have was available through plugins.
The best part of all this was that gedit is installed by default on Ubuntu, as a part of the GNOME desktop environment. So I didn't have to install anything, except for the extra plugins. Props to Ubuntu for including useful stuff by default.