This is the wrong comparison. Notepad is like nano or ed. More powerful editors are available on Windows too.
> I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE.
Usually we do. But notepad can be invoked quickly from the command line, tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs, and is opened by default by a lot of utilities like git (you can change this, of course, but you might miss one). So it ends up getting used a lot for quick one-line changes and improvements are still welcome.
tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs
That's been my experience too --- I've opened several hundred MB files (mostly logs) in Notepad, mostly for searching through, and it handles it quite well. Inserting characters at the beginning can get a little laggy, but that's still nothing compared to a lot of other IDEs/"industrial strength" editors that choke on much smaller files.
...and yet the standard Windows edit control that Notepad is based on does nothing fancy at all; its data structure is basically one array that holds the entire file contents. No ropes, gap buffers, or other "advancedness" --- just one big buffer. It also means extremely low memory usage, a tiny amount of fixed overhead + file size.
(I am one of those programmers whose main source code editor on Windows is Notepad. I also mainly use the cmd for compilation. I've never felt the need for anything more complex, and I do use an IDE (VS) mainly as a debugger, but if I just want to open source code and read or edit it, I use Notepad. Then again, I don't use those languages where an IDE is almost mandatory for navigating through source code, so it works well. In the time it takes for an IDE to load, parse, and display a file, I could've opened, edited, saved, and compiled with Notepad.)
> Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
This is the wrong comparison. Notepad is like nano or ed. More powerful editors are available on Windows too.
> I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE.
Usually we do. But notepad can be invoked quickly from the command line, tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs, and is opened by default by a lot of utilities like git (you can change this, of course, but you might miss one). So it ends up getting used a lot for quick one-line changes and improvements are still welcome.