Text editor

The last decent text editor I used was Notepad. Now that I don't use Windows, I'm yet to find an editor that compares with it. So what sort of thing do I look for in a text editor?

Features

• Fast load time. An editor should really load instantly. It should never bounce on the dock, or have any perceptible delay from clicking open till having a place to write being available to the user.
• Seamless large document editing. Another performance aspect. Large documents should be editable quite normally, with no load lag or use lag. Even documents of more than a GB should be easily editable. Loading a huge binary should cause no problems at all. Obviously some actions, such as full text search, could not run so quickly—in these cases the actions should at least not block the interface in any way. Like hypercalc, an editor should never overflow.
• Proper unicode handling. In other words, a text editor should be able to edit text. Yet you'd be amazed at how many editors fail some simple unicode tests! Also, getting encoding right when documents don't come with an encoding declaration is advanced science.
• Comprehensive syntax highlighting. This should work for every language, and it should be perfect. That includes, for example, literate CoffeeScript in HTML. This is advanced science too, but it should already be achievable.
• Window geometry memory. Because duh.
• Term equivalent. If I have to use emacs in the term and TextWrangler.app on the desktop, then something is wrong. Map the latter into the former. It doesn't matter how you do it, just make it possible. Then we'll order pizza.

Notepad doesn't have some of these features, such as syntax highlighting. I call it decent because it also lacks a lot of anti-features.

Anti-features

• Autosave. Keep it away from me.
• Reforms. One day TextWrangler.app saves geometry, and the next day you "upgrade" it and it doesn't. That's why upgrades are called reforms.
• Formatting modes. I once lost an HTML document because TextEdit.app managed to royally screw up the interpretation of a document, and converting it was considered an editing action that it "autosaved" onto a medium which doesn't support automatic saving. Brilliance.

This is part of the "Win32 was awful, but then worse things replaced it" line of thinking.