A Spastic Ninja

I just got into modding Sins and was following a tutorial for creating capital ships: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/370181 . I get to the point of editing the brushes file, but when I open it in Notepad++ its almost entirely "nul" icons. Opening the file in regular notepad puts three spaces between each character. I assume this is wrong, so how do I set it so I can actually read it? <p$1$2$