Data bytes are shown in hexadecimal on the left side of a split screen. Text characters are shown on the right as per the Unicode standard. You may enter hex data on the left, select an encoding, and ...

The relationship between byte and char is not a simple one. Back when most programming was done in C, few people cared about anything but ASCII or maybe ISO-LATIN-1.

For ASCII characters from u+0000 to u+007f, for example, the UTF-8 encoding form maintains transparency for all of them, so they keep their ASCII code values of 0x00..0x7f (in one-byte form) in UTF-8.

We eventually had to implement our own regexp engines (or the byte []-to-char []-to-byte [] overhead would kill us) and calls from Ruby to Java still pay a cost to pass Strings.