I'm looking for a very fast simple basic text editor for graphical desktop environment.
I'm user of Ubuntu (mate) and Mint (cinnamon)
Using Windows 7, the notepad.exe is very lightweight and fast, but all text editors (Pluma, gEdit, Geany...) that I tested on a Linux Window Manager is a little slow and heavy.
Edit:
I tested Xed(consumes 12mb), Mousepad(consumes 10mb), Tomboy for notes (consumes 24mb), Sublime Text(consumes 70mb), Gedit, Jedit.
(notepad.exe using Wine) but the two together consumes 13mb of memory.
all text editors on terminal have a problem, each bash instance or tab consumes 5mb of memory and more of mate-terminal or gnome-terminal that consumes at least 7mb of memory.
Finally, I found Leafpad, it consumes only 3.6mb of memory, fast, simple, basic.
For programming, the best nowadays is VSCode, but there are others light and good, for example: Light Table, Brackets
I use Notepad++ as my "lightweight" text/ code editor on Windows. It's cross platform compatible, offers syntax highlighting and extensible with plugins. It only uses about 8 MB on windows compared to the 2 MB that notepad uses.
Additionally, it has tabs built in so you can work with multiple documents in a single instance (no need for multiple instances).
On Ubuntu:
sudo snap install notepad-plus-plus