Everyone pretty much agrees that although the Arduino IDE is simple to use, for professional programming it’s just not up to par with mainstream code editors.
I’ve used Notepad++ for several years as my editing environment of choice, for html, css, php, etc.
Would it be possible to use Notepad++ for Arduino Sketch editing? Well as it is, yes, but there’s no syntax highlighting, extension recognition, or easy way to upload sketches to the Arduino (a macro that executes “C:Program FilesArduinoarduino.exe” $(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)).
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All that and more can be done, with a few tweaks of the environment, and a plugin.
Follow the instructions at
http://sriramiyer.net/blog/2014/02/12/using-notepad-plus-plus-instead-of-the-arduino-ide/
then download the plugin at http://sourceforge.net/projects/narduinoplugin/ and follow the instructions in the README file.