Free Text Editors

While most text editors come without the price tag, only some of them will provide you with full editing power. Here are some of them:

PSPad

PSPad is a fantastic free text editor with all the features you would expect from a powerful editor. PSPad comes with built-in support for multiple syntax highlighting profiles. It comes with a hex editor, code page conversion, built in diff, templates, macros, spellcheck option, auto-completion, Code Explorer and much more. PSPad includes several additional tools that are especially useful for HTML editing (compress, format code) and also integrates TopStyle Lite and TidyHTML. The program can be used as an IDE for any compiler. Additional features include support for projects, file browsing, custom shortcuts, built in FTP client to edit files on the server and much much more. Unlike most other editors, the menus are very well thought out and all functions are located in the most logical location.
[OS: Windows] [Price: Free]

Vim

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.
[OS: Cross Platform] [Price: Free]

EditPad Lite

EditPad Lite is a powerful and versatile text editor or word processor. Designed to make text editing as convenient as possible, using EditPad Lite to edit text files will save you a lot of time and frustration.
[OS: Windows, Linux] [Price: Free, Pro version $39.95]