If you want something a bit more GUI based, you could go something like medit. It is super light for a GUI app, has nearly everything you need for a text editor, and it has a terminal built in that you could use to for compiling (or even to have an automatic setup to compile on save).
I use medit for .ini editing, because of good highlighting and split view of the same file or multiple files. It's great. Try it.
Notepad2 is my default lightweight notepad replacement. It integrates seeminglessly and is quite powerful