Comment 2 for bug 848253

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

Gedit is a text editor, therefore it stands to reason that it tries to "protect" users from accidentally opening a binary file in the editor, which might result in a less-knowledgeable user damaging it.

In order to get the functionality you need, may I suggest using a full-blown binary/hex editor such as ghex or bless. These are much better suited to the task.

Also, if all you need is to look at strings contained in a binary file, the "strings" command might be of help. You can use it to generate a text file without extraneous characters and then analyze that using gedit.

Please let me know if some of the programs I described help in fulfilling your requirement.

Thanks!