Notepad++ is what convinced me to invest in text editors and bought sublime text instead. Notepad++ is a good editor, buts it’s a bloody eyesore. These days I tend to just use VS Code as it’s Good Enough for the text file editing I do and I don’t have to bother looking up my license info on reinstalls.

In what ways is Notepad++ an eyesore? It's got a lot of themes out of the box and you're free to tweak it as you like. My one complaint is that they don't give you a way to edit the toolbar since there's a 'save all' button I'm always worried I'll hit on accident someday, but I think there's even a plugin that might fix that.

Customize Toolbar is the plugin you're looking for: https://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-customize/

Perfection? It is super slow to start compared to vscode and it has a super annoying transparent search box that always seems to get in your way.

I never realized notepad++ was that slow until I, last week, had to manual updates config files (open file > find in file > scroll to line) on a bunch of servers that had both vscode and np++ installed. I think I would be able to perform the change in vscode in less time that it takes np++ to open the document.