i've been trying a few over the past year. i purchased Sublime Text but i've switched to Komodo Edit (freeware) a couple of days ago because i like the GUI better. Sublime Text starts almost instantly but Komodo takes about 3 seconds to load. i don't do any coding atm but i like using a better text editor than the default Windows Notepad. i like my creature comfort.
i tried Atom but it is a little slow to load. it's Open Source and seems to have lots of support. another one i like is Adobe Brackets. it is also actively supported and developed. i love the Live Preview mode in Brackets. Sublime Text is very good and fast, though the development seems to be slow lately.
Notepad is good enough for my needs as a pure text editor. Of course I use something else for programming, word documents, NFO files, etc.
Other: GNU nano. I know, I know. Cue the "OMG nano is for lusers" posts. Thing is, once you actually learn the keybindings it's pretty awesome. The main issue I've found is that a lot of the keys conflict with terminal built-ins, but that's easily fixed (just disable the terminal emulator's built-in keybindings). On those occasions when I need something more powerful, or with better undo functionality, I typically use jmacs (JOE's Emacs emulation mode). Emacs itself is okay, but has a confusing (for my use patterns) excess of functionality. When I think a graphical environment would work better for the task, I usually use Geany. vi/vim I don't even touch. IMO the modal stuff is more suited to nitpicky editing than writing lengthy scripts.
I used Gedit daily - with a few plugins makes a great code editor. When in the terminal I go for Nano. I do like Komodo Edit, but its a memory hog. Notepad++ in Windows.
I always replace Notepad with Notepad2. It's like Notepad, but a little bit better and still super light.
(G)vim for Linux and Notepad++ for Windows. I tried Gvim for Windows but I don't really like it for some reason.
I like the plugins and ability to customize Sublime. On Linux I still use vi in a terminal window the majority of the time.