General :: Finding A DUMB Notepad Equivalent?

Why isn't there a simple program like Microsoft Windows' Notepad? One which is format stupid (ASCII only), so I can over-ride hidden html character entities. The other day I found myself wasting hours trying to get the Xephyr to work by cutting and pasting the terminal instructions from the following website into a gnome-terminal session - but each time it would give me the same, small window. I tried copying the text from the browser (using copy and paste) to gedit, but gedit was not showing the hidden character entities from the html code. After all this lost time trying different resolution sizes, I became suspicious that something was interfering with my cutting and pasting between gedit and the CLI terminal. Sure enough when I compared the webpage source code it gave me the clue to the problem.

From the same page - two examples:

Hidden character (notice the '�' or × )
$ Xephyr -ac -screen 1280�786 -br -reset -terminate 2> /dev/null :2 &
NO hidden character (notice the 'x')
$ Xephyr -ac -screen 1280x1024 -br -reset -terminate 2> /dev/null :1 &

[code]....

I even tried cutting and pasting out of the terminal yet somehow it retained the hidden characters. I could not find any preference setting in any of these programs which would allow for either eliminating the hidden characters doing a cut and paste or at least revealing them. I would like to plead to programmers out there for this basic functionality...