Duplicate of #618 #1508 #1708 #2081 #2654
Geany will not load a binary file, thats why you got the message. Geany is C, in C a zero byte indicates the end of a string, so most functionality will only see the contents up to the first zero byte, and binaries are littered with zero bytes. So no it can't be "enabled" without major work.
Notepad++ is C++ where strings can contain zero bytes, so its "easy" for it to use binaries.
And nobody is in competition, so nobody "wins" just different projects have different capabilities.