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The wonderfully lean and functional editor ConText uses "smart tabs" - the relevant option is active by default.

Note two things:
- it works like Word (i.e. with tabstops defined at certain positions, not with tabs defined as expanding to a certain number of spaces)
- only fixed-width-fonts are available (which is good, since it's a programmer's editor)

On Windows, I use ConTEXT (http://www.context.cx/) extensively. It has built-in syntax highlighting for several languages, and you can download highlighters for hundreds more. Also, it usually takes well under a second for it to startup (uncached).
Plus it's free, which you can't beat (OK, OK, maybe with open source...).

ConTEXT!! Of course, it's not text mode.

A free alternative to EditPlus is ConTEXT (http://context.cx./ It's fast and lightweight, customizable, actively developed, has a good support community, has a lot of nice features and even more features planned (some already implemented) for the next version.

I used these free editors very often for coding languages ranging from C++ to Tcl/Tk: Crimson Editor and ConText.

ConTEXT Superb text editor. Can't recommend it enough.
GAIM
MS VC++ Toolkit 2003 (Don't hate me. It's pretty good)
SpamPal: Nifty little spam filter. Works with almost any client.

Just suggestions. Not affiliated to any of the above in any way except as an end-user.

Clearly you aren't a web developer.

Most of the web developers I know (and I know a lot) started out using tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive etc, which now output decent XHTML, but now they are starting to move toward XHTML and CSS in their designs (which are some of the best on the net, might I add), and they're switching to using text editors exclusively for writing the code, plus your standard graphics programs for the images. I do the same.

The great thing about XHTML is that is separates the content from the design, which in turn makes your code beautiful and easy to write and maintain. I was looking at an XHTML page I had written the other day, and I thought, gee, I could just put this up as plain text and people would still understand it. It was free of all that contextual crap (tables, font tags, one-pixel spacer images) that heavily-designed HTML pages of two years ago were full of. So no, a text editor is not just for writing static text. I use mine for every aspect of the design process, though, admittedly ConTEXT is not notepad, it's pretty close. And I would contest that the sites I develop aren't crappy looking.

You may be able to design sites with a tailored WYSIWYG HTML editor, but you usally have little control over how everything fits together, and it results in messy code that is hard to understand. If that works for you, then fine, great. All I can say is that you better "know some of this stuff" and how to do it without your XHTML editor -- learn it in notepad -- and then, once you see what was output by your editor, and if you have any respect for the XHTML standard and the ideals that the W3C had in mind when they thought of it, I have a feeling you won't go back.