Text editor capable of viewing invisibles?

Question

A recent problem* left me wondering whether there is a text editor out there that lets you see every single character of the file, even if they are invisible? Specifically,

Answer 1

I've encountered the same limitations — my specific issue is the need to be able to display characters like U+200B, the zero-width space, and U+200C, the zero-width non-joiner. (Used in electronic texts with such languages as Khmer, which otherwise do not separate words with spaces.) Unlike you, instead of "platform doesn't matter," I need an editor with Windows and Linux versions, and Mac too is desirable.

I haven't found any text editors that will let you display them on-screen, although some (many?) will let you enter them and will properly treat them as characters that can be cut and pasted and whose presence is indicated via cursor movement. (That is, if the screen shows "if" and there are three ZWSP's between the "i" and "f," you have to press the arrow key four times to move from "i" to "f.")

TextPad 4.7.3 is otherwise my text editor of choice, but it is very limited in its acceptance of scripts; and TextPad 5 definitely does not show these invisibles.

I have often resorted to opening my files in OpenOffice.org Writer, which will show a gray slash at these characters' location with invisibles turned on, and Microsoft Word, which displays a double-box (box within a box) character for such invisibles. This double-box has width and changes the line-breaks on-screen, which is not trivial and which I haven't seen in any other editor.

Answer 2

I prefer UltraEdit even though it is not free. It is very capable of showing hidden characters, including a robust HEX viewing mode. (I am not affiliated with the publisher, IDM.)

Answer 3

If you are running a 32 bit version of windows, you can see BOMs and other invisible characters such as carriage return or line feeds that look like a music eighth note in MS Dos Editor which you can open by typing "edit" in the run box or from a command prompt. Unfortunately, the ms dos editor is not available on 64 bit systems :(

Answer 4

vim (in either textual or graphic mode) can show all control characters if you :set list. The BOM is a special case, controlled by the :set bomb or :set nobomb commands.

Answer 5

I am not sure as I haven't used it in a while, but I remember that SciTE was a good one that showed me "too much information" for my needs.

Programmer's Notepad on Windows might work.

TextPad (It's nagware, runs on Windows)

I'm not sure which of these will show the hidden characters out of the box, but they're all made for "nerdy" stuff, so I assume that they would work ,at least with a little tweaking. I can verify that Programmer's Notepad does show "hidden" characters.

Answer 6

In Visual Studio's Open File dialog, the Open pushbutton has a down arrow next to it that lets you choose Open With.... One of the options in the resulting dialog is Binary Editor.

I've used this now and then to spot some invisible character or to resolve some line-ending issue.