What is your text editor of choice?

vim, when available, otherwise vi.

Gedit here!! All boosted with developer plugins...Boy It Rocks!!!

vim or gvim

I use Notepad++ also when I am on Windows. Geany has many of the same features. Numbered lines, color coded text, symbols to denote returns, spaces, and tabs. Also documents pop up in tabs, so it is easy to go between them.

In Mint, Geany is in the Software Manager. It might be worth a try to save yourself having to swap between OSes.

I currently have to code C stuff on a 13 year old AIX Unix box. The terminal handler is horrific, making VI a severe pain to use.
On more modern (Linux) platforms, my commmand line editors are vi and VIM. Often VIM's defaults colors for keywords do not work well with my monitor, so I switch back to VI.

Many times, I will ftp the source to windows and use notepad++. This editor should be ported to Linux. Kedit and gedit are two great GUI editors.

I use vim in CLI and pluma in GUI

I like Nano to edit from command line. I like Geany from GUI.

Nano allows me to quickly access and edit files while using bash. I play minecraft and use bash to launch the server. I can quickly edit server.properties file without having to click around.

Geany handles GUI text easily. I can edit yaml files, or plain text. The line numbers allow for easy reference when I need to make changes.

I use nano in the terminal and sublime text 2 for everything else.

For quickly editing things like configs, I use nano. But for programming, I use vim.

I agree that there is no 'best' editor. My main reason for choosing vi over emacs was mostly that emacs was so big (back in the 80s) and vi was on all systems. Now, I'm comfortable with vi(m), and it's now not worth getting up to speed (again) with emacs.

I like the way that I can move quickly through a file with vim but emacs is almost more of a universal IDE/OS. If you lean to use Emacs' add-on tools, it can be pretty powerful. Each tool has it's advantages. which is 'best' depends on how you work and your preferences.