/me is self-taught on regular expressions.
That's just one feature amongst many that make such text editors much nicer to work with than notepad.
I am not going to try to order them "best to worst." They are just ordered randomly.
Some freeware editors include Crimson Editor, Metapad, PSpad, and Notepad++.
Some shareware editors include EditPlus, Textpad, and Editpad Pro.
Personally, I'd recommend staying away from things like vim and emacs. While they are free and have win32 versions, they are just ugly applications.
Narf:
Note that the editors themselves are nothing like trying to learn a new language. Regular expressions are to a degree, though. Many of the apps have dropdowns in the find/replace dialog that helps you build them more easily.