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To be honest this tool gives me much more of a headache than writing one myself. Of course, I love regular expressions, but that is because I have taken the time to learn the 'language'. To me, saying regular expression are hard to understanding is like saying any language you don't know very well is hard. Take the time to learn regular expressions and it will soon become easy to understand them and write them.

Well, I'll halfway agree with you davies, this thing does give me a bit more of a headache than writing expressions myself, but I'll disagree on the latter, I know regular expressions fairly well, along with various pcre, php and java's idiosincracies, and I'd still say some regular expressions are hard, beyond the most basic matching like email, url and paths. Now, not hard enough that I won't do them, but still a trying on occassion.
My personal peeve is the seemingly overly anal retentive nature of looks.

It's not that txt2re is a bad tool, it seems to work quite well, the interface just needs a serious overhaul in terms of usability.
Its a little monotonous to use with the "click, view, repeat" syndrome, maybe checkboxes, or some javascript toggles.
But all in all, not a bad PoC.

This could be useful, especially for when you have to work in a new language, and you just want to explore/experiment with some regexes. I agree that the interface isn't beautiful, but I expect that it's a work in progress.

A good, free tool is the Regex Coach, available at: http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

It is quite useful. You can use it to experiment with Perl-compatible regular expressions interactively. Two featuers that I espeically like are:

It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English.

It can show a graphical representation of the regular expression's parse tree.

Interestingly, it's written in Lisp.