When I'm using Windows, I have found the Syn TextEditor (http://syn.sourceforge.net) to be quite useful. It has basic syntax highlighting, about enough for me and is quite compatible with FTP and such. It supports Python pretty well. Its user interface is quite easy yet pretty powerful. All in all, this is a very good editor, good enough that I probably won't go looking for another one any time soon.
On Linux however (which I haven't used in quite some time, sadly), I usually use vim more than emacs. To tell you the truth, I haven't really used emacs that much at all, only for a short time. I keep meaning to actually try it out and get used to it, but I always find that if I need to edit a file quickly, I just go to vim. Then again, I don't write much Python code in Linux anyways. Even so, I intend to try emacs out soon. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list