Most web design requires you to look at html source code, because even if you design your pages in a graphical editor like Nvu or Dreamweaver, you always end up with typos that you have to go back and fix quickly. Perhaps you forgot to close a tag or you misspelled something in your content section, either way, you will need some type of text editor. On Windows most users rely on MS Notepad for this, but there are better editors out there.
Florian Balmer‘s free editor, Notepad2 is not the world’s greatest text editor, but it is simple and has many features over MS Notepad. Best of all you can manually setup Notepad2 as your default in Windows, by renaming notepad.exe. Note, that you have to replace the notepad.exe in multiple locations first and then let Windows know you want to keep the new file.
What I like is that Notepad2 has no nagging ads or spyware.
Download Notepad2.
Another great open source notepad replacement is Notepad++ :
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
It supports Multi-Document Interface.
Notepad++ is my favorite text (code source) editor :
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
It supports tons of languages, including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc…
Some of the things that stand out to me: Macros, Multi-document sync’d scrolling, Vector-style zoom in/out, and Code highlighting that is on-par with Dreamweaver. It also has comparable site-wide find and replace. Another nice feature are tabs that behave like Firefox. They are draggable, and a middle-click closes them. Anything I could say won’t do it justice. In short, what Firefox is to the browsing, Notepad++ is to code.