Notepad3

i used to do all sorts of stuff with Windows XP/2000 (like sysprepping reg-tweaked/debloated/pre-loaded Windows ISOs for myself). but now i have fully moved away from Windows to EndeavourOS/KDE and haven't looked back; many others have jumped ship to PoP_OS. yes, you do have to slightly limit/research your hardware options to get a great experience, but i've always been an AMD GPU guy (due to their better thermals / power efficiency), and all of my laptops are Thinkpads w/Intel wifi, so take this with those grains of salt. i do miss Foobar2000 and HeidiSQL (DeaDBeeF and DBeaver aren't quite as polished), and Affinity products are hard to get running without glitches in Wine/Proton, but otherwise it's been fantastic. though i've had to fiddle quite a bit with Chromium and MPV settings to enable GPU hardware acceleration for video decoding.

If you want GUI and a working and extensive syntax highlighting, your options boil down to Scintilla-based editors, which means Notepad++, Geany[0], TextAdept[1] or Notepad3[2]. There's also lite-xl[3] and CudaText[4], which are not based on Scintilla. Lapce[5] also looks promising, although it's slightly stretching the "light" condition. For years, AkelPad[6] was considered to be the best substitute for the bundled Notepad, but it hasn't been updated in a while, although it still works absolutely fine in that role. For the console, Helix[7], Micro[8], Moe[9] are all possible options which will work in cmd.exe out-of-the box. Regarding vim/nvim - I had some issues with plugin-heavy configs running on top of Cygwin, but YMMV. 0. https://www.geany.org/download/releases 1. https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept/releases 2. https://github.

Notepad3 is actively maintained and has many improvements, btw. https://github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3