Open source text editors

One area where free software is especially strong is in text editors- there are tons of them, and lots of good ones. 

1. Notepad++
Notepad++ is what Notepad on Windows should've been, with a wealth of addition, useful features. One of its biggest advantages is tabbed editing, which means you can open multiple files in the same window. It also supports different character encoding systems.

2. Emacs
Emacs is a family of text editors. The original Emacs was written in 1976 by Richard Stallman. The most common version is GNU Emacs, but also notable is the fork XEmacs. Emacs uses a Lisp interpreter to provide a very high level of customization and scripting abilities.

3. vi
Not all version of vi are free and open source software, but free implementations do exist, such as vim. vi is best known for its extensive list of key bindings, and is often regarded as having a steep learning curve.

Download Notepad++
Download GNU Emacs
Download vim

Image Source: "notepadr;" "notepad++;" http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/260/notepadr.png