Mac's equivalent of notepad?

I used textedit but i cant save stuff as .html without having to save it as something else as well

you can save as HTML.

go to the top menu *forgot which one* and there's a setting called 'convert to plain text' or something along those lines.

and then you can save with anything you like. just add .html to the end of the file name. and untick .txt.

Don't you just do this?

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/3514/picture3wh2.png

Edit/ Sorry didn't read your post properly.

If you're coding, there are loads of coding apps on Mac, I use TextMate which isn't necessarily free software, but it's obtainable, if you catch my drift... :P