Daniel, the only thing that Notepad and CC Editor have in common is that they are text entry software and Notepad is about as basic as they get.
I started my first site in '97 with a book ('How to Produce a Website in 24 Hours' or a similar pie-in-the-sky title) by my elbow while tapping away using notepad.
Then I tried CC Editor '97 and never went back to notepad again.
It's worth using the editor just for the feature where tags and content are colour coded; and there are a myriad other features which make the editor a great program for building a web page by hand, but
(1) you have to take the time to learn the features, and thankfully CC's editor doesn't need a lot of delving into the help file, and ...
(2) you have to be committed to hand coding.
Personally I don't like Wizzywig style editing as I don't feel fully in control.
I used to do a bit of hobby programming back in the days of command line OS and Cobol, Fortran, Pascal Ada Perl Basic etc - I can understand how WYSIWYG and hand coding work differently and IMO until computer systems can match the human brain's capacity to think in certain ways the two will remain separate.
You just have to look at the awkward, convoluted code that programs like front page produce. The code can be hard to edit by hand.