any suggestions to choose cool programs to edit files?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 12:02:09 -0700,
  BB Cao <pearlsmm at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm staring change to linux to work on editing things, such as, documents, presentations, figures,... I used to do those things on Windows machines. Of course, all my other jobs has been done on Linux and I am very pleased of that. As a starter, I found it is difficult to find apropriate programs. Your suggestions will be highly appreciated. I'm interested in doing the following:
> 
> 1, write Latex files,

Lyx is supposed to be nice. It is available from extras.