Thanks for the suggestions, I think I'll try Notepad++ and Programmers Notepad first; I already encountered their websites but couldnt see from the feature lists if they would do what I need. Sublime looks neat, but I was just looking for something simple and dont want to spend that money when I would just use 10% of it.

Oh and yes, the problem with the mixed lineendings or missing spaces and cluttered diffs was one reason I asked for this. I disabled automatic line ending conversion in hg and git, because I would actually like having everything more consistent with just LF even on Windows and I dont like running the risk of silent corruption of a binary file.

The other problem is when some files with mostly text and a bit of binary or which would not work with other lineendings or spaces/tabs removed would get screwed up, but at same time it would be inconvenient and weird to use a hexeditor for.

I should recommend Emacs, but if you want a "simple" text editor Notepad++ is comprehensive and well made, and it performs better.

Be sure to launch the integrated plugin manager and install appropriate plugins; important general purpose ones include

• TextFX (low level text manipulations like deleting blank lines, case conversion, escaping, sorting)
• XML Tools (includes reformatting XML documents)
• Customize Toolbar

You can also easily define syntax highlighting schemes for file types which aren't supported out of the box; consult the help pages.