I started with the free version of Coffee Cup HTML editor, until somebody gave me Dreamweaver. I used that almost exclusively in code view. The only time I used the WYSIWYG view was when I couldn’t work out how to achieve what I wanted, and then I’d see how Dreamweaver did it, then delete it and code it myself. I was self-taught, with nobody around to ask for help (and I hadn’t discovered SitePoint), so it was a handy resource when all else failed.
Then, like @James_Hibbard, I switched from Windows to Linux. The only thing I bothered to run in Wine, and still run in Wine, is the colour contrast analyser, which I’d be lost without. I tried various editors on Linux - Screem, Geany and Bluefish. I eventually settled on Bluefish (although I can’t now remember why I preferred that one ) and I’ve been using it ever since.