I’ve always been satisfied with Leafpad as a Notepad equivalent. No fluff, just a rectangle for dumping text.

What about Ed, the standard text editor?

That's a terminal program.

I only consider graphical applications to be applications.

I think the basic text widget of all the toolkit support text attributes (color, styles,…) and as the solutions for syntax highlighting and other stuff existed already, it was not a big stretch to add them instead of having two editors (the first user was the programmer)

Ah, I guess that's the problem then!

The first user shouldn't be the programmer :-)

GNOME text editor is just that.