Notepad++ is nice, but a bit bloated IMO. I’m personally a big fan of Notepad2 and Notepad3 - they’re just standalone portable EXEs which don’t need to be installed. On most of my installs, I replace the OG notepad with this, so when I type “notepad” from the run dialog, it launches Notepad2.

Sublime Text is really good too. It is a paid app but the free version just has a message suggesting you might want to support them by paying that pops up every 10 manual saves. And you don’t need to save more than once per file since it autosaves on every character. WinRAR style basically. I rarely see the message myself.