Hello CrashNBurn,
I don’t know about the other application you mentioned, but I didn’t know about ALT + numbers behavior. Both Windows Notepad and EmEditor insert the same symbols. I think that is the Windows behavior. Those are Unicode characters and that is why they can’t be saved as ASCII. You can save them as a Unicode file. The other application assigns ALT+0x as inserting control characters ( Advanced > Insert Special Character. I hope this helps.
Thank you!