As crazy as it sounds, for the longest time I used notepad as my primary editor. Then I switched to Notepad+ (still no highlighting). I'm now on TextMate (mostly due to my switch to OSX), but I find the syntax highlighting to help in quickly scrolling through and finding segments of code. If I'm looking for a variable, I just look for that color, etc.
You're on your way... Come join the rest of us in the world of IDEs. Once you've seen your "editor" autocomplete a member from another class (in a namespace you haven't even imported), there's no going back.
At my 9-5 I have to use Dreamweaver (code view) and I have no gripes about the text editing portion at all. Maybe there just aren't any IDEs for OSX I've fallen in love with yet, but they all have a sort of clunky aspect to them that can be annoying and can't be changed. Any IDEs that are like TextMate but with auto-completion? (I've done my fair share of looking in the past 3 years on osx.)
Sweet. My Vim sessions generally consist of issuing a dozen random commands before I happen to type an "I", followed by exiting, restarting, and cursing. Glad to hear you're having more success!
