use SublimeText, it is perhaps faster now than the stock Notepad

As much as I used to love Sublime, the version switching caught me out which burned me a bit, even if admittedly my v2 key lasted an unreasonable time through the version 3 beta, but I don't want to risk buying a v4 key without a clear roadmap of when they might switch to version 5.

They changed how that works. Licenses are no longer tied to version, you get 3 years of updates no matter what the version is.

It’s $99 for something that is almost 5 years old at that point.

I can definitely vouch for this! I've been using it for many years and it's been essentially the same the whole time: fast, lean and working on all operating systems.

Combined with LSP I find it to be quite a good IDE too. Handles extremely large source trees quite well.