You can improve a text editor without making it more complex. TextEdit on the Mac is just as minimal as Notepad, perhaps a little more so (because its menu's on the top rather than in the window), but it has powerful support for fonts, page layouts, and the like that you can access if you ever need it. I actually use it as my main word processor in most situations because it's powerful enough to handle it.

Well, support for unix-style line ends would not hurt...

Legacy software prevents this from happening.

I would like to ask you: How? Microsoft managed to support Unicode in Notepad, starting in Windows 2000; the heuristic used when detecting character sets is fragile and has potential to break what used to work (mostly opening readmes anyway). How would support for Unix style line ending break legacy software?

Yep, I agree. Notepad should be (and is) the simplest possible GUI text editor. All the devs that I know use either Notepad2 or Notepad++ for more complex general-purpose editing.

Anyone uses something other, like TextPad?

I am still using TextPad which I started using since 90s. But wish I could jump to something better. TextPad is now dead with no update for, what 6 years? No v.5 doesn't count as update, it's downgrade. No Unicode, only more fancy GUI.

Switching editor is really hard.

Just my experience: I have been using textpad for ages, and I am still using it (v.4.7, for the reasons you mentioned). In the meantime, however, I had to learn emacs (for Slime etc.). Now I notice that when I open textpad I begin to miss emacs features. And on emacs, I miss the fancy GUI far less than I imagined.

I use notepad++.

I'm a fan of Programmer's Notepad. http://www.pnotepad.org/