I have had it with e-texteditor and Komodo Edit! I wrote a comparison of the two and have been switching back and forth between the two since then. While both editors have really great features, the basics are JUST NOT THERE. E-texteditor: each new version just crashes more and more, now everytime I use tortoise SVN from the project pane it crashes, it's not as snappy as I want either in general. Komodo Edit: the file browser filter is just too painfully slow! The textbox on top of the file browser is a live search, except if you want a live search to work, it better load FAST, otherwise every key I type is going to cause me to wait. Plus, the filter is not smart, it doesn't allow typos, I have type the name right or I am going to miss the file I want(E-texteditor doesn't have this problem, they have a pretty good quick launch).
SciTE is a pretty popular open source code editor. It's lightweight and it's fast. It's not as featureful as the other two, but it opens REALLY fast. When I first decided to switch to it, I thought, oh great, now I have to use a file explorer as my project pane and drag files onto my editor to open it? That's kind of a hassel too. So I changed my file associations so that most of my project files .py, .html, .mak etc open with SciTE by default. Now I can just click on the file and it opens in the editor. But then it hit me, I can open them with Launchy! Launchy is a great launcher app for Windows and I have been using it for a long time and have been very happy with it. I configured it to scan my project directory, and vola! Now I can open any file in the project at thought speed! Under a second, definitely. Way, way faster than I could do in e-texteditor or Komodo Edit. All I do is hit Alt-SPACE start typing the name of the file I want to open until it shows up as the selected choice, and then hit Enter. Usually it doesn't take but 3-5 key strokes to get the file you want to show up, and typos are ok, I can type shgrp for example and it'll give me show_group. I am really loving this way of working, I can get to stuff so much quicker. The reason it's so quick, is because of the speed of both Launchy and SciTE. Launchy runs in the background, and is really fast and responsive to your keystrokes. SciTE launches instantly.
The only problem now though, is that since launching a file using SciTE opens a new SciTE window instead of in a tab in the existing one, I now end up with a lot of SciTE windows open and they can be hard to manage. If those windows are grouped in the task bar(which XP does for you when there are many similar windows), it will help, but having it open as a tab would be even better. I might just dig into their code one day and see if I can make this happen.
BTW: To give you an idea how fast SciTE is compared to the other two. E-texteditor took 8 seconds to start up, after which there was still a popup dialog I had to click, which frozen it up for another 5-10 seconds, but my first click didn't work so I had to click again to get rid of the dialog to make it go away before I can start working. Komodo Edit took 25 seconds just to come up but about 32 seconds for it to be interactive(stopped loading). SciTE opens in 1 second or less everytime.