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 was talking to my rep over lunch today and he was telling me about how great Visual Studio is.  I tried it and I must say that it is wonderful.. It is truly incredible how many colors our modern programming languages use.  We both agree that Microsoft's product cannot be beat and that all these other "editors", lacking colors, are useless and will die soon.