In revenge of Notepad, I recommended Florian Balmer's truly excellent freeware Notepad replacement, Notepad2. And when I say replacement, I mean replacement:
I’m with Mike, I love TextPad. I’m been using it now about 3 years. I’ve done a lot of work in the past with reporting/analysis of IIS log files and TextPad can whip through a 450MB log file pretty good. The marking of lines that match certain criteria, using Regex, and then being able to copy ONLY those lines allows you to only get the lines of text (or code) that you want, etc…
The marking of lines that match certain criteria, using Regex, and then being able to copy ONLY those lines allows you to only get the lines of text (or code) that you want, etc…
FWIW that is a textbook definition of GREP!
But of course everyone loves their own favorite editor.
I think the lesson here is for us to know a few tools so we can A) figure out what we like, rather than blindly accept the featuresett our tool offers and B) have a reasonable point of comparison rather than blindly advocating one tool.
I’ll start switching between TextPad and EditPad to see how that goes.
FWIW, I loves me TextPad, which I’ve used for years. Good editor, regex support, and I can use it to grep. Customizable syntax highlighting; you can add tools (e.g., integrate a command-line compiler – search my blog for “Textpad” to get to a post with an example); etc. But of course everyone loves their own favorite editor.
Also up there is Notepad++, based on the open-source Scintilla component.
Then I like GREP. 
I’ve tried UltraEdit and EditPro for a short time each and was doing the same with TextPad and then just kept using it. But yeah, everyone likes what they like.
In addition, RegExBuddy and PowerGREP are AWESOME tools from the same vendor. Well worth the money.
i feel your pain. i too went through text editor wanderlust. i went from ultraedit to jedit to editplus to notepad2 to editpad to textpad and finally settled on crimson editor.
crimson editor isnt the be all end all, but i like the simple elegant approach and the tiny footprint. it has the important stuff and what it doesn’t have i can live without or use a more centralized app for a specific purpose (ie; ide for code etc).
you could do alot worse than crimson editor.
it’s free and the author is pretty smart 
Have you tried JujuEdit ?
If the developer of it would polish it a bit I would love it, but even at the beta stage I like it better than Notepad2. Notepad2 is slow with long lines, big files and has stuff I do not need that much.
JujuEdit has stuff I need and is superbly faster when dealing with BIG text or code files. And it does Hex too. And the stuff you mentioned as important (all sort of highlighting, super fast regex replace etc). But the author doesn’t seem to put much effort to it anymore 
What a shame!
Jeff,
I have a fairly comprehensive list of editors (including notepad replacements) at www.vbbox.com/tools/editors/
ConTEXT all the way. It is fast, supports a ton of languages and file formats, has a tabbed interface for viewing multiple files, and it has a nice file compare interface.
That is pretty much everything I need.
A little delayed, but gVim happens to be my favourite, whenever I’m forced into using Windows (Win32 port of vi/vim). Seems to have most things on your list, though I can’t be 100% sure about the syntax highlighting however, since none of the editing I do on Windows is of code
I like the BDV Notepad. All my friends use it for a long time. It has a lot of unique functions for regular users and it is free. Here is the last version 5.0:
http://www.badevlad.com/bdvnotepad_en.htm
I’ve used TextPad for years, but I’ve switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS, and the good folks at TextPad don’t support linux. Oh well, looks like I’m going to purchase EditPad for both Linux and Windows; [fingers crossed].
Code-Genie, that’s good handles large files well.
GVim is definitely the way to go, IMHO… if you spend that much time doing text editing, wouldn’t it be worth a few extra hours to learn how to edit faster? Inline regex, customizable folding and syntax hilighting, and pure power editing. It seriously doesn’t get any better if you’re a power user willing to spend some time to learn the ways of vi.
You can create hardlinks with fsutil shipped in Windows XP and 2003:
fsutil hardlink create C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache\notepad.exe “C:\Program Files\Notepad2\Notepad2.exe”
fsutil hardlink create C:\WINDOWS\system32\notepad.exe “C:\Program Files\Notepad2\Notepad2.exe”
fsutil hardlink create C:\WINDOWS\notepad.exe “C:\Program Files\Notepad2\Notepad2.exe”