I've long used jEdit as my text editor of choice for coding html, perl and php. jEdit is pretty much just another in its class that will give you syntax highlig

I've long used jEdit as my text editor of choice for coding html, perl and php. jEdit is pretty much just another in its class that will give you syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, macros, and a few other nifty programmer-friendly features, just like BBEdit, UltraEdit, etc. What I really like about jEdit, personally, is that it's built in Java, and so it's pretty much identical on Mac, Windows and Linux. This is key when moving back and forth a lot, as I sometimes do. Depending on what kind of programming you do, though, I'm going to have to agree with the other posters who've suggested vim or emacs. I'm a vim person, myself, but there's nothing wrong with emacs at all. I guess, go for vim if you really want to go minimal; go for emacs if you want to simplify with the ability to build out your text editor into an IDE. The big reason I say you might as well go for vi or emacs, though, is because without an IDE, you will likely need to spend more time at the command line - whether that means running your compiler, firing up your debugger, etc. I never bothered learning some of the more advanced techniques with vi, but I've written some fairly big projects in a terminal using screen, vi and "perl -d". One little tip I think is worth passing along: I declare my functions in perl like this: sub my_method_name # the method that does that thing and returns a hashref { .. } The reason I think this is worth mentioning is because it saves me so much time when working in a terminal with a minimal toolkit: I run "grep -nr ^sub" and it returns all my method definitions with a brief (one line) description. The output from that grep is like a mini "whatis" database o my codebase.