SciTE!

With all my searching for a free text editor, I had never came across the SciTE editor. I guess that's good, because I may have been disappointed with SciTE as a mere text editor. I came across it packaged as an IDE in Scite4AutoIt3 with function lookups and other nice stuff for the freeware Windows scripting language AutoIt. Just to quickly plug AutoIt here - this is a powerful scripting language. I've used AutoIt scripts to configure Windows 98, 2000 and XP Test machines at work - automating repetitive tasks like setting Windows Explorer preferences or change the display settings. AutoIt is like DOS batch files on steroids.

Anyway, with the SciTE editor, which is based on Scintilla (yeah, I also was like "What?" at first), you have a really cool IDE for AutoIt. As well as keyword completion and syntax highlighting, there is also code folding, a feature I've only seen in Visual Studio .Net's IDE.

SciTE means Scintilla based Text Editor, according to SciTE for Windows Scripters.

And I thought Crimson Editor or JEdit were the ultimate in freeware text editors!