I agree that Fedora and Debian-based distros offer the best support for
Octave. I use Ubuntu, and get all the common octave packages from its
repositories.
However, my text editor of choice is jEdit (
www.jedit.org), which is a
great cross-platform text editor written in Java, with lots of plugins
and a Matlab mode for syntax-highlighting that includes all the basic
keywords and can be easily extended. I find it much easier to use than
(x)emacs, or any other common text editor.
Marcus Vinicius