Earlier quoted context omitted.
As crazy as it sounds, for the longest time I used notepad as my primary editor. Then I switched to Notepad+ (still no highlighting). I'm now on TextMate (mostly due to my switch to OSX), but I find the syntax highlighting to help in quickly scrolling through and finding segments of code. If I'm looking for a variable, I just look for that color, etc.
You're on your way... Come join the rest of us in the world of IDEs. Once you've seen your "editor" autocomplete a member from another class (in a namespace you haven't even imported), there's no going back.
Sounds awful, I hated all that stuff in VStudio. I'm one of those crocks that thinks it makes you lazy in your organisation.
grep '^fname' *.c