My editor of choice right now is gedit, and it's not meeting my needs Well, there's your answer. I'm an emacs user so I recommend emacs. I know of many smart

My editor of choice right now is gedit, and it's not meeting my needs Well, there's your answer. I'm an emacs user so I recommend emacs. I know of many smart vi users so I recommend vi. I'm a Mac user so I recommend Textmate, but only if you really prefer it over emacs or vi (which are open source and ubiquitous -- you'll probably never need to learn another text editor ever again). Learn one of those. Whichever one you like best. O'Reilly's Learning GNU Emacs was a very good book for me when I was a beginner; there's probably a similar book for vi.