I'm the last person on the planet to defend anything from Micro$oft but isn't it a bit harsh to blame an application if you download it from a dodgy site?
That aside FWIW I like Notepad++, I'm not a proper programmer but I've used it for years. It can be used in a basic way but is highly configurable and 'knows' a bunch of languages so when writing in EzGPIB for example, just set it to Pascal and keywords and so on are highlighted. Lots of plugins around, like a very handy hex editor/viewer which I found invaluable when trying to figure out what the heck was going on when downloading data sets from a spectrometer using EzGPIB as the controller.
Oh yes, it's released under Gnu license and so it's free too!
Adrian