I've been using Programmer's File Editor for many years. I have found it to be the a great text editor for straight text editing. By "straight", I mean that you can't do things like make bold or italic, etc. The files are saved in either DOS or Unix format, as pure ASCII text. It does not understand UTF-8 but it does understand accented Latin characters and the German double S, as in weiß, which are part of the ASCII character set.
It has line-numbering, which you can turn on and off; it understands both windows and unix line endings; it can insert user templates, reformat lines and paragraphs according to a set number of characters; you can set the number of spaces for tabs, so that, for instance, for DW lists you can set the tab to two characters for lists and nested lists. The home page is:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/default.htm
The developer stopped updating it in 1999. But it's still widely used by programmers and he's left it on line.