All it needed was a way to work with other newline formats cleanly. Adding much more than that (even tabs) makes it into a different thing that leaves a gap in the niche it used to fill.
When I was a windows user 20 years ago I was using scite, the Scintilla demo editor. It had the lightness and simpleness of notepad with syntax highlighting.
That, and finally getting rid of keeping a lock on the file handle of the opened files. Sooo many times I needed explain someone that their directory could not get deleted or their apps failed to uninstall simply because they were still reading its readme.txt
It's not the lock on the file, it's the lock on the directory. The common file dialog in Windows changes the current directory of the process to the file that was selected, and a Win32 process holds a lock on its current directory. So when you open readme.txt in a particular folder, Notepad.exe's current directory is changed to and holds a lock on that folder.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
Wow, so notepad++ and vscode quickly change the cwd after opening a file via a win dialog?
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
