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...

vi and emacs are at opposite extremes.

I've heard people defend vi's dual mode, but it's empirically poor: I've watched how often I have to hit esc (way up there in never-never land), and it's all the time. It's faster than reaching for a mouse, but it's a shitload slower than ctrl- or alt- whatever, which is what most sane editors now use.

On the other hand, emacs is far at the other extreme. Multi-key combinations for everything. A lot of them are completely counter-intuitive too.