I dream of Geany
Here's a plug for Geany, the primary text editor in Puppy Linux.
I've been using Geany for a few weeks now, and it's really a nice piece of software. For one thing, it's not foreign to someone who primarily uses full-fledged word processors -- and Windows ones, at that.
I'm not using Geany to write code. I use it to get stuff written fast -- and all the things I want to do, including changing stuff to upper case, to lower case, get word counts, it does it with ease. And there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts to make this and other stuff happen.
Geany uses the GTK+ toolkit, meaning you don't need KDE or GNOME to use it. There are even versions for Mac OS and Windows, if you want to keep things consistent across platforms.
On Windows, I've been partial to EditPad, but with Geany, I don't miss it.