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...

I'm sure a lot of us can agree that all editors suck. I don't think I've ever used an editor that I didn't dislike in some way. Either they're plain weak, or they're unusable, or contain hilariously braindead design decisions.

Flame: vi variants and emacs suck pretty bad, even for editors. Get out of the stoneage.