Thanks for your reply. I think it's a case of 'nothings perfect'.

The writer's editors i find not to my taste. I'm happiest with the
graphical plain white background text editor where i can use a 22/24
point font which i find comfortable and pleasant to use. Non of the
console editors are comfortable for long periods of time for me.

Again i prefer the minimalist app for the task but then again one
doesn't get all one hopes for. Bookmarks, manual saving (Scribes do an
auto which is nice if that's what you like - i prefer manual and then
i'm in full control), word count, search, Spell check and Thesaurus.
To find what you want one has to compromise somewhere. But then again
Leafpad with the bare minimum is great just to get immediate thoughts
down, and can then be worked effectively with Abiword for word count
and spell checking (or alternatively just run Aspell in the terminal).
Medit offers a very convenient File Selector (with filter) so one can
have the .txt files in any directory listed without searching.
Texmaker was nice in a lot of ways and is a good choice [a rather
faster app than Kile which looks a bit more powerful].

I was quite surprised how few graphical text editors there are for
linux; gvim, cream, scite, gedit, kedit, Kwrite/kate, geany, editra,
medit, nedit, and axe (not worth a look). Lyx to some extent is what
one's looking for... as they are designed for processing words rather
than a text editor which i surpose should really be named programmer's
editor. It was an interesting search in someways i suppose.