Good text/code editor

Hey
What's a good code/text editor? Something like notepad but that highlights html code, strings etc. And I don't want it to choke on big files like notepad does...

gvim: meh
emacs: ugh

I always wondered why it took so many decades for the *nix people to make a decent editor; by decent I mean "not limited to what a poor man's crappy terminal can do", using standard+customizable keys, supporting modern editor features, and just not being so half-assed as most Unix tools and applications (not the OS) are.

And now they have such editor - Kate. Why not using such a fine piece of software?