My favorite Windows text editor is EditPad Pro published by Just Great Software http://www.editpadpro.com/ . The users manual is available online at http://www.editpadpro.com/manual.html or as a .pdf at http://www.editpadpro.com/manual/EditPadPro.pdf. It’s not free, but it is well worth the asking price to me.
EPP is a full featured programmer’s text editor with the ability to interact with other software via user configured “tools”. Much of the interface and most of the features are configurable; however, it is perfectly usable right out of the box without configuring anything.
Some features are: customizable menus, bracket matching, configurations by file type, horizontal or vertical split window or detached 2nd window, bookmarks within files, macros, several handy conversions including line breaks, tabs to/from spaces, text encoding, sorting, and a modest file comparison command. The Search box accepts regular expressions.
Support for EPP is the best I’ve ever experienced for any product. It has an active, well supported support forum which is internal to the product, not web based. Questions are answered by knowledgable users and often by the developer. Bugs that can be replicated are fixed promptly.
I’ve been an EPP user for 13 years. I’ve tried a few other text editors over the years because of some unique feature or simply someone’s rave review, but I have always returned to EPP in short order. Familiarity probably, but first class support most definitely. Updates within a major version are free.
According to their web site, the only feature missing in the free trial version is the spell checker and configurable print headers.
The developer of EPP is also the author of the O’Reilly “Regular Expressions Cookbook” and sells a couple of RegEx utilities, one of which I own but use infrequently as my RegEx needs nowadays are very simple.