Ubuntu – Text expander program

The two classic open source Unix editors are GNU emacs and (g)Vim and both work fine on Ubuntu. They both have more features than you can learn about in a lifetime, including what you're after. There are plenty of others two too, but you might as well start with the best. (I'll try not to get into which of these is better, since it's already an epic holy war.)

By the way, sed is probably a better alternative than grep for RegEx manipulations from the commandline, and you can write and save scripts for it. (Of course you can use perl, awk and python for reg ex too.)

Some inspiration from xkcd: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png

I'do go for inkscape

It's vector-based and i've used it quite a few times. I think it's a very good option.

It's help is also very good, as it has many tutorials in order to learn how to use it (you can access them through: Help > Tutorials)