urgh, I was once asked to help out in a class, where we used Word and WordPad to edit text files. Overall there isn't much going for either, they are slow to load, and not really designed for plain text. If you try NotePad, you get your Unix line ends glooped, and you've not got very far.

There are plenty of good alternatives out there, you can take your pick from Outside Links, to which I would add the now very stable (i.e. read dead), but still downloadable, Programmer's File Editor and the very alive EditPad.