I tried Emacs but found it too heavy and didn't want to learn Emacs Lisp, so I tried 4Coder and found it super streamlined and easy to get started on. However when I moved from Linux to BSD I couldn't use 4Coder any more, so I learned Vim and really liked the system. The hardest part with Vim was figuring out what plugins I wanted. I wasted
a lot of time with that, until I found a website that lets you download an almost perfect setup of plugins and settings which I could tweak.
http://vim-bootstrap.com/
So I'd say go with 4Coder if you want to just get in and start coding. But if you want a free editor you can use for more than just programming, and are prepared to spend a lot of time learning it try Vim.