Crimson Editor is a GREAT barebones-text editor, and the support of defining your own language syntax specifications can be nice too.
If you're using a Mac, I highly recommend (read: you really really
really should) checking out SubEthaEdit, on
www.codingmonkeys.de - not only is it a fast and slim text editor with syntax highlighting, it also allows you to use Rendezvous to have multiple people working in the same document at one time - this creates ample opportunities for some really interesting programming dynamics.
Oh, and you want to see hand-coding? Take a peek at the site I'm developing along with a friend at
www.vectorray.com - it's not quite finished yet, but yes, every inch of that site was hand-coded, mostly in SubEthaEdit (okay, images are an exception, but they *were* self-done in Photoshop). Feel free to send comments on the site to
webmaster@vectorray.com 