Try UltraEdit.
I used Modelsim and Xilinx ISE as editors (as well as for their primary role) cos I had no other editor for verilog/vhdl syntax highlighting. But these really have the minimum and should not be considered as editors, both being huge software dedicated for simulation and synthesis, not free at all for Modelsim, and using more than 10GB (!!) in the case of ISE. The editors included are just there for convenience.
Emacs is just like doing many things but is not simple at all. In my opinion it's just stuff for jerks. I really much prefer Ultraedit which is even more powerful and yet much much simpler. You can do so many things but you still have a beginner friendly toolbar, and everything is focused on easy edition, comprehensive naming, which is not the case of emacs.
Ultraedit is especially good for being able to highlight almost any language with a system of language files (a few hundred are downloadable). It also has auto indent, text folding, scripts, advanced search engines using variables, macros, comments hiding, conversion of characters, or spaces to tab, file formats, project management and much much more...
I mean you may find a few of these in emacs but you will have to type an obscure Linux-like command to be able to get it. This is also the problem for VI. My colleage just used VI but he just had to recognize that he actually had no reason for using a complicated tool such as VI or emacs while he could use something much more user friendly like UltraEdit and that does the same and much more (ok it is not a file manager nor a mail client like emacs is, and you cannot play tetris with it, but who cares ??)
It just to remind me of the first time I installed Linux. I had to struggle to find the multimedia player to play some music. The program was actually something like "xmms". No one can deny that anybody would understand better "xxx Multimedia Player" or "MP3 xxx" than "xmms"... What those developpers are thinking about ?? It's just nonsense to me.
---------- Post added at 18:02 ---------- Previous post was at 17:58 ----------
Indeed, it's very useful when you have plenty of signals with similar names to edit in paralle, which is more the case in a HDL language where you instantiates many buses and other "parallel" stuff, compared to the sequential approach in C/C++
Column mode is a must have actually.
I tried quite a few softs but definitely UltraEdit is doing a great job and very simply.