I've been an AkelPad user for decades but all good things come to an end. I've looked for a couple years now for a replacement (with better encoding heuristics and, more importantly, a Linux version)... no great luck. geany is ok (and does Linux) but AP is a better editor.
Well, good news (especially for friends of text editors done by Russians

): I've found a superb open-source editor called CudaText (created by a chap called Alexey Torgashin) that is in many respects as good as AP and in some even better. And it comes with support for a lot of platforms including Windows, various Linux distros, MacOS, Solaris as well as Free-, Net- and OpenBSD.
I've worked with that editor for a fortnight and have now switched completely, from AP under Windows and from geany under Linux.
See
http://uvviewsoft.com/cudatext/ for more details and downloads.