As a fellow long-time UltraEdit devotee... I hear that there is some luck in getting it to run under Wine. If you can withstand the experience, there are more details burried in their support forums.

vim may be the text editor you need. http://www.vim.org/

It isn't free, but I know a lot of people on Windows that use and love Slickedit and they have a Linux version. There is a free trial download. www.slickedit.com

Hey Asa, re: text editing, have you tried Gnotepad? It's already installed, I believe, and it's got a tabbed xface like Mozilla.

Hello Asa,

I use the Java-based Jedit ( http://www.jedit.org ), and I could not be happier. I use it on Windows, however it should run just fine on Linux (and MacOS X) too.

It has syntax highlighting for HTML, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and more; and with plugins, it can parse XML and transform it via XSLT. It's everything I need, works reliably and beautifully, and runs everywhere!

Oh, did I mention it's open source too?

SciTE (http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html) is a quite nice text editor.

i like FTE (http://fte.sourceforge.net). but that's mainly because i was used to old n'good Borland Pascal/C++ environment with the shortcuts Ctr+Ins, Del+Ins (as opposed to ctr+c, ctr+v).
anyway, it's worth to check it out

I havn't tried it myself
But mayby Xcoral could work?
http://xcoral.free.fr/

I used to be an UltraEdit man myself, when I was on Windows, and I still use UltraEdit when I occasionally pop back into Windows. But when I moved to Linux (RedHat 7.3 right now), I wound up using Vim 6 - mainly because of its excellent Unicode support. It is rather different from UltraEdit, but I do believe Vim is the way to go for you. It will require a lot of learing, since Vim is really different. But the effort will pay off.

Thanks for all of the great suggestions. I'll go give at least some of them a try.

--Asa

What I like with GNU/Linux is that you have so much choice between the apps you use, it sometimes is hard to try them all and find the apropriate for you. And since I'm also using UltraEdit in Windows, I've also been looking for a similar editor before. I've not found one that matched my desires perfectly. But I'll give some of the above a spin, too, and would like to add my closest finding to what I've been looking for: beaver http://www.beaver-project.org/ - which is at least 100% compatible with the Ultraedit's wordfile.txt files.

Asa -- I use emacs. It damn near gives me a boner.

However, for the more sane among you, the underrated Moleskine may be a great choice. I have an obscure-keybinding-hating coworker who swears by it.

Also, if Netscape is gonna pay for it, you can go with Komodo 2.0.

Doh ... links didn't work.

Here's Moleskine:
http://www.icewalkers.com/softlib/app/app_01342.html

Here's Komodo:
http://activestate.com/Products/Komodo/?_x=1

FWIW, I do most of my coding in HTML, JS, SQL and Python. YMMV with a compiled language. And, on windows, I use Textpad.

I'm gonna ask the Komodo developers if they'd be willing to donate a few-seat license to mozilla.org staff. In the mean time I'm gonna download it and check out the editor. Several people have suggested it to me.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. So far my initial testing puts jscript well into the lead (with plugins I have tabs, spellchecker, htmltidy, syntax highlighting, advanced sorting, almost all the things I had in UE.)

--Asa

JEdit is the weapon of choice. it is a java program and it is, IMHO, the only real contender against Ultra edit. it is highly customizable and feature rich (you should customize, default options sometimes are weird) i used both programs, and now i am using JEdit at work without a problem (i 've chosen it becuase it has almost all the aspects of Ultraedit, and of course free). it has many useful plug-ins (especially buffer tabs, jdiff, code browser etc.) The main drwback of ultra edit is, it is sluggish on slow computers (but for machines >700Mhz, 128MB it is all right.)

http://www.jedit.org

Sorry in my previous post i meant "..the main drawback of JEdit..."

Try Quantra:
http://quanta.sourceforge.net/
It's for KDE but you can probably get it up and running fine in Gnome. It's a Homesite clone that is very feature rich. There is a proprietary version sold by theKompany as well.

Visual Slick Edit is the best tool out there programmers, and they have versions for just about every platform. I would definitely recommend that.

I second the opinion of JEdit. Ever since I started college, I have been changing of text editor several times until I found JEdit. Its expandability is impressive, and there is not much I can complain about.

JEdit is very good IMO. It's a bit full-featured but you can turn most of that off. I've been able to create syntax colouring rules for the language I'm using it to edit (which is of my own creation and has some pretty weird syntax) without huge difficulty using the latest build.

My main problems with it are:

* Project handling is weak, in particular it's very difficult to add files any way *other* than importing a directory, and I have some issues with that process.

* Can't find an easy way to create a key shortcut that just runs an external command with no interface... this should be trivial to make a plugin for but i keep thinking it should be there... (there are loads of ways to do this in stupid internal consoles and stuff, but...)

It isn't going to replace JBuilder for me, but for editing non-Java stuff I wanted a lighter alternative with configurable source highlighting; and I got a whole lot of other stuff for the ride. :)

Oh yes, i recently made the 'switch' too.. A double switch actually.. First i bought a Mac (best machine ever) and then made my IBM laptop a dual boot machine with RH8. The only problems I've had are that my internal wireless card wasn't auto-detected (had to get drivers) and I can't get my trackpoint scroll to work (yes, i've tried everything out there).. but other than that.. the interface is BEAUTIFUL! And mozilla runs like a charm on it, not to mention looks great.. The fonts on RH8 are amazing, much better than any other OS. I love all the things I can do with RH out of the box and it's just so darn fun to play with. I've missed commandline interfaces since DOS (shudder). I don't know if you've noticed this, but try downloading a file to any directory and watch the filesize in nautilus.. it automatically updates itself as its download.. how cool is that?? finally an operating system actually in control of itself :)