Notepad++ is perfectly fine to code in. With the wealth of plugins it has, it's pretty similar to vscode in how you can trick it out with all sorts of things it can't do by default.
I'm a tolerant person, but come on, man. Between VSCode, JetBrains, (n)vim and emacs, and I can't think of a legitimate reason to use np++ for development over any of them.
Macros man, being able to record a macro and use it quickly and easily is worth it's weight in gold when you're doing something super repetitive that there are no automatic refactors for.
And i hate the "modern sleek design" culture of making all the options hidden and difficult to reach. Notepad s interface is so fucking clean and usefull.
I still use intellij because of a lot of other things but quite often I find myself using notepad for specific tasks and it's such a treat
I don't use JetBrains because it's not free, I mainly use VSCode since it is and works fine, but I would use np++ after that. I spent years working in np++.
I played with linux in the early '90s, but mostly got started on GenToo Linux years ago and they had people installing Nano when building from the ground up. I grew to like that and never really learned VIM. I did use emacs every now and again, but all of those have lots of unwieldy key combinations that require memorization and don't work like a lot of other programs people coming from, for instance, Windows would be at all familiar with. The barrier to entry was too high to bother with so it was wine and np++ since I was also still using Windows for work.
I've been forced to use a Mac for work for the last almost-year and still can't find anything as good as np++. BBCode is as close as I can get and I'm still not really a fan.