If you want GUI and a working and extensive syntax highlighting, your options boil down to Scintilla-based editors, which means Notepad++, Geany[0], TextAdept[1

If you want GUI and a working and extensive syntax highlighting, your options boil down to Scintilla-based editors, which means Notepad++, Geany[0], TextAdept[1] or Notepad3[2]. There's also lite-xl[3] and CudaText[4], which are not based on Scintilla. Lapce[5] also looks promising, although it's slightly stretching the "light" condition. For years, AkelPad[6] was considered to be the best substitute for the bundled Notepad, but it hasn't been updated in a while, although it still works absolutely fine in that role. For the console, Helix[7], Micro[8], Moe[9] are all possible options which will work in cmd.exe out-of-the box. Regarding vim/nvim - I had some issues with plugin-heavy configs running on top of Cygwin, but YMMV. 0. https://www.geany.org/download/releases https://www.geany.org/download/releases 1. https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept/releases https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept/releases 2. https://github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3 https://github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3 3. https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl/releases https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl/releases 4. https://cudatext.github.io/download.html https://cudatext.github.io/download.html 5. https://github.com/lapce/lapce/releases https://github.com/lapce/lapce/releases 6. https://akelpad.sourceforge.net/en/download.php https://akelpad.sourceforge.net/en/download.php 7. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases 8. https://github.com/zyedidia/micro https://github.com/zyedidia/micro 9. https://github.com/fox0430/moe/releases https://github.com/fox0430/moe/releases