Vi for windows? If you really dare. EMACS is a piece of cake comparatively...but I cheated, I learned WEMACS.

http://www.softwareonline.org/products.html

Well, you do have gvim or gnu emacs for windows. Both work well enough. Both are equally versatile. I'll leave it a that without starting a vi vs emacs war.

Aww, how often to Travel Technology threads make it over to OMNI?

On the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Another vote for textpad. I use it to view/edit 200MB text files, and it works like a charm. Best thing, you can try it for free for quite a while.

I downloaded and installed Crimson editor and it's pretty damn good! ^
I'm surprised its not used as much as the others mentioned.

Keep in mind that WordPad is a basic word processor, not a text editor. Big difference if a text editor is what you need.

Personally I went from WinEdit to Crimson Editor to Notepad++, the last of which I quite like. Handles syntax colouring for one language embedded in another (i.e. Javascript embedded in an .htm file.) - and Notpad++ is free which is great (so is Crimson Editor.)

I don't imagine there's much point in selling a paid text editor any more. There are too many good free ones.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

Notepad++ is great for the price, and ends up on most of the customer systems I touch, but has a couple of annoying quirks, and is missing some functionality that you can get from the paid programs. The quirks that really annoy me:
1) The find function does not have an option to automatically dismiss the find dialog on the first match, so that you can just use F3 for further matches.
2) If you have multiple files open, and file change notfication set, when you agree to load a changed file, it makes that the active file, and starts a text select with the anchor at some random spot on the page. This is really bad if one of the files that you have open is being changed occasionally by another program (like a log file).
3) Default syntax highlighting changes not just color, but font, (to a less readable one) for comments in Perl and HTML.

Some missing features (compared to my fav, Ultraedit):
1) Limited sorting, no duplicate removal, no numeric, can't define multiple key columns.
2) no compare
3) no column editing mode
4) help is only available online, not much use on a plane.
5) doesn't automatically select hex edit mode for binary files.
6) No menu functions to trim all trailing spaces or convert all leading spaces to tabs. Could probably be done with a macro, but that is a hassle for a simple function.
7) No built in save to/open from FTP.