Buying a membership may go against the spirit of the post and the community, but Anna’s Archive is a very worthwhile cause and you get faster downloads without waiting.
If that’s not an option, they have torrents for chunks of their collection as far as I understand. Costs nothing but bandwidth and seeding helps keep the archive safe.
Notepad++ is my text editor of choice as someone who just edits the occasional file. I’m not a programmer or anything, but it’s nice to have those autocomplete and syntax highlighting features for config files. Helps me keep track of stuff better when editing.