Mostly I use Geany, which is a pretty straightforward, but also pretty powerful text editor. It has nice things like column selection, tabs, and a built in terminal emulator. If you're familiar with Windows it's kinda like Notepad++.

I guess QOwnNotes counts too! Which I use a lot for organising notes. I always have it open.

Otherwise I use Vim (and sometimes nano) a bit when I'm working in a terminal environment, but I really don't need to take advantage of most of what it does.

I really enjoy learning about interesting Vim features and have romantic ideas about learning GNU Emacs (especially org-mode and acme, but that's more just out of interest than any practical need or want for efficiency.

These are the features I look for in a text editor:

Find and replace

An obvious feature, but one I use a lot.

Column selection

The ability to select areas of text vertically, as well as the usual horizontal. So if you had a list of numbered items and wanted to select (and maybe delete) just the numbers you can select all of them at once. I didn't even know this existed till someone showed me it in Vim, and now I probably wouldn't use an editor without it.

Ones I don't really care about:

Code/tag/whatever completion

The the annoyance at the times it gets in my way outweigh the tiems I find it useful. It takes like less than a second to type things out, so— I do like it in a shell though!

• A Tour of the Acme Editor

Terminal-based, contemporary take on a Vim-like modal editor?

Calling it a 'A post-modern text editor' really bugs me though! BAD JOKE.

• https://helix-editor.com/

Plaintext + line drawing (stored as json)

• http://akkartik.name/lines.html

• https://www.texteditors.org/ - A text editor wiki.
  • The EditorIndex page has a nice big list of them.