For the past few months I have been working on a simple windows notepad like text editor. It’s nothing special, but when I first switched to linux I looked around and it took me a while to find leafpad. Unlike leafpad however, Janus uses gtk3, a much more modern toolkit then gtk2, it can display and modify binary data, and it can highlight code syntax for most popular languages. Feel free to check it out on the github.
That binary editing is weird… You can’t see the values you typed? Why not something like most other hex editors do?
Primarily, I wanted to make a simple notepad editor, not a hex editor. Binary editing is a feature, but not the main purpose. Many other text editors use escape characters to mimic the way that hex editors edit text, and while this is a very rational solution, I wanted a simple but elegant solution that would allow full control while not adding in a lot of overhead, and I came up with this one. Every character is still distinguishable for the most part, but the main purpose was always to display it as legible text rather than hexadecimal.