Sublime Text is pretty and fairly easy to use. I own a copy. However, I would seriously recommend that you take the time to learn Vim or Emacs. I've used both, extensively, and can recommend either without reservation. They have slightly different strengths and weaknesses that lead to endless comparisons, but neither one would be a mistake to learn and use as your primary development editor. I currently use Emacs. Bo…
Hm... What can you say about Textadept? For the first glance it seems like a good alternative with lesser entry barriers. At least comparing with vanilla vim and emacs.
It would still be beneficial to learn Vim or Emacs. The scale and breadth of add-ons for these environments is staggering. This makes getting started seem difficult, but one can simply focus on learning the basics (which are all that are offered by most competing editors). There are good tutorials for both Vim and Emacs built into the editors. It will only take an hour or so to go through one and learn the keys and commands for straightforward editing.
Another way to get started would be to start with a stripped down emacs. Although I use GNU Emacs, there are simpler implementations. I like mg. Its a micro-emacs that supports most of Emacs's common commands, but has no extensibility. It's definitely not a toy, and might provide a nice stepping stone to full GNU Emacs. It runs in a terminal, starts up instantly, and has a small footprint. On a Mac, I install it with homebrew. Microemacs is the editor reported to be used by Linus Torvalds.