I used vi, but I realized it has a bunch of really powerful stuff I don't need. I have tr, sed, awk and grep for those things can heck, I have a whole shell built just for text processing.

Nano (and before it, pico) work better for me in 80% of use cases where I need to just edit text.

On windows I can use notepad++, which is probably the best win32 text editor in existence, bar none. Between it's plug-ins, and powershell (albeit with a hammer like coaxing), it's just about as powerful as the Unix environment.