Notepad2

Notepad2 is the best text editor I've found. It is fast. It looks and works like a real app, not like some VisualBasic junk that was written by someone who never saw the UI standards. It has effortless syntax highlighting. It uses tabs (the keyboard kind) properly and at only 4 spaces wide! It handles Unix and Windows linefeeds without thinking.

Out of the box, it works perfectly for my purposes. And it's completely free and open source.