Pretty text editor for Ubuntu

[chombee]

I use a text editor a lot for programming and writing LaTeX, so I want
it to look pleasing and to not give me eye strain. For someone like me,
a programmer who text edits a lot, this is probably the most important
feature, but seems to be overlooked in Ubuntu/GNOME. Believe me, I have
looked far and wide: GEdit, Mousepad, Leafpad, Scribes, Geany, Cream and
GNOME Terminal + Nano. I'm looking for a pretty text editor for GNOME.
What I think I want is:

* A light text on dark background theme, to reduce eye-strain. I think
I've found that the best thing for this is not actually white on black,
but more like 90% white (a light grey) on 90% black (a dark grey). But
if anyone can educate me, please do.

* A pretty colour theme for syntax and other highlighting, colours that
go well together and with the white on black. I don't want to choose
these colours myself, I am not a designer, I want someone who knows what
they're doing to make good choices that I can use.

* And also a nice looking monospace font. Out of Ubuntu's default fonts,
I find that 'monospace' and 'bitstream vera sans mono' are okay. If
anyone knows anything better I'd like to hear.

With GEdit you can change the colours of things, but you have to set
every colour, including every single syntax highlight colour for every
language, yourself. This is a bit pointless: it should just support
themes and let the user choose from a list of themes. And if you do go
to the trouble of setting up a light on dark theme, certain things like
the highlighting of search matches can't be changed and make text
invisible. Scribes, Mousepad, Leafpad and other GTK editors have the
same problems.

GNOME's terminal seems a bit better than GNOME's text editors: you can
actually select themes. I find that if I choose the white on black theme
and then change the white on black to light and dark grey, things seem
pretty good. But nano is not a very advanced text editor, to get syntax
highlighting you not only have to choose the colours but also specify
the regular expression patterns yourself for every language, and I don't
want to learn vim or emacs.

Cream probably does best, an easy-to-use GUI editor actually offering
themes to choose from, including a couple of dark themes. But none of
the themes seem particularly great, and although cream seems powerful,
in fact it really has a *lot* of impressive features, I've never stuck
with it for long as an editor. It uses ugly icons and its menus are
packed with too many ugly options that I don't use.

Anyone got any advice on any of these points? Does anyone know of a
better editor? Got any tips on designing editor themes? Is there
actually a way for users to swap GEdit/Scribes themes by exchanging some
config files, and if so does anyone know of any good themes? Or does
anyone have a good Cream setup they can share? Or anything.

Thanks