Geany fills this niche, and is close to being feature complete. It could use help and attention as well, it unfortunately doesn't get enough imho. Also on github: https://github.com/geany/geany
The pace of the development, including just reacting to issues or PRs is rather slow.
Basic editing functions are few (just compare the contents of the "Edit" submenu with Notepad++). This is partially mitigated by "Send selection to", but a text editor without a simple line sorting?..
The settings for the "Build" submenu is artificially limited. Why just 3 filetype and 3 shared commands? Why not allow changing the keyboard shortcuts for those right in the same window?
No macro or scripting at all. In my view, such programs benefit a lot from having all their actions available as a list of commands which can be used to construct custom chains and scripts or be used setting the keybindings.
Somehow, not all the lexers from lexilla are available? For example, Nim lexer is more than 3 years old (5, if you count lexer for an earlier version then called Nimrod), but Nim settings for Geany still uses the Python lexer.
For sorting I do in fact use the "Send selection to" to sort, bound to Ctrl+1, but I never got around to binding anything to Ctrl+2.
There were tons of little fiddly things in Notepad++ I never used because the things they fixed they never came up often enough to build up muscle memory to remember them. YMMV.
You could also just run it in a browser window with a VNC HTML bridge, this would be a good base for that: https://github.com/accetto/ubuntu-vnc-xfce-g3
The easiest way to get Chicago95 setup is to run its GUI installer python script. I don't try to script it in a dockerfile or container setup.
This also goes for terminal-based editors, BTW. The old RHIDE is in many ways still unsurpassed in the intuitiveness and inherent extensibility of its text-based interface. A modern *nix-based equivalent would find plenty of use for light development work over SSH. (You could even ssh in and develop from an Apple iPad with keyboard addon!)
I have geany open right now and it is displaying underscores just fine with Noto Sans Mono. I have no idea what configuration you were using or what fonts, but this shouldn't be a problem currently.
I had the issue with the Flatpak version in an unmodified install on Fedora Silverblue 35, but my experience is apparently hardly unique.
[styling]
line_height=0;2;
This has been a bug for years after they closed the issue and as far as I am aware they are the only software to have ever had a problem with these supposedly out of spec fonts that are still the default on some popular distributions.
EDIT: It seems the font/underscore/spaces issues should be fixed as of Geany verion 1.37: https://www.geany.org/documentation/faq/#geany-does-not-disp...
I'm not using Geany much at all any more, but still got love for it!
I remember npp having a GUI, but from memory it was old-school, in the clunky sense and not in the simple one. It didn't have a little window showing code with the updates for example.
Now that you bring it up, that's an area where a developer could make a helpful contribution.