When I was at middle school, when I was just a beginner, I had the problem of not having a nice and more advanced notepad. I spent a while until I found editplus, after that I, experimented with a lot of text editors unsuccsesfully. Once in a while, while googling "great text editor" saw something about those strange linux text editors. Crazy people, I thought.

Under editplus I learned about regular expressions and a bunch of things. Funny enough the first thing I made when installed linux for the first time was to install ediplus under Wine. Just some time later when I learned about emacs I really understood the programmers world.

Still editplus is the best editor for windows I have ever found.

I have some "util" apps I use since who knows when under Windows: SqlYog, Editplus, LeechFTP, Putty, StartupCPL (http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml), hdclone. It's funny to see how much easy is the world for a developer under linux. Util apps simply doesn't exist. Just some commands that may not come by default on your distro.

+1 for EditPlus!