For gedit I mainly had in mind plugins like snippets, external tools, advanced bookmarks, vim keybindings, and of course, the latex plugin.
However, from the look of that essay, I think you might consider looking into Vim. Vim is all about doing quick navigation through a document using keys, and is very “home row”-oriented. You can set bookmarks (up to 26) for jumping back to a predefined places and selections, and have just as many (perhaps more; I haven't fully explored it myself.) different clipboards going at once. And there are hundreds of plugins for it (not to mention a scripting language). Emacs is similar, but not as “home-row” oriented.
Decision Guidance ⇒ Best editor for Debian.
