Is there a Linux equivalent of Programmer's Notepad or Notepad++

A lot of Linux users eventually migrate to Vim or Emacs. They have steep learning curves, but near-infinite customizability. For a more notepad++ like editor, I hear good things about geany, but am a vim user myself.

In my opinion the choice of an editor is a very personal matter. If I were you, I would look at this list and try them one by one until I found one that worked for me. If all else fails, I noticed on that list that notepad++ is reported to work well with wine.

Vim sounds like what you're looking for

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VimHowto

Instructions to install it are on that page too :)

There are tons of editors, many with features you'll love. My suggestion is definitely to migrate to something that works on multiple platforms and use it on all your machines.

That said, here is a link for many Ubuntu options: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Programming

GNU Emacs, Vim and jEdit are good options (thought I don't use jEdit):