Shortening the longer leg is much less invasive and probably preferred, but the discrepancy has to be caught very early. You need years of measurements to predict exactly how long each leg will be and when. If you have those, there’s a pretty small window when the long leg is exactly the right length to tell it to stop growing.
One of the uses of notepad was also that it’s installed by default, and was a place you could be assured wouldn’t mess with your text. No formatting, no weird characters you didn’t ask for.
Notepad++ is great, but you can’t be assured it’s installed on any arbitrary Windows machine.