The question indicates my preference to use emacs, but the overriding issue is that I want to be able to do a normal text search and somehow see/copy-paste the byte-offset of the matched text.
To be clear, by byte-offset, I do not mean emac's point value, which shows the number of characters from the start of the buffer, eg. in UTF-16LE, point considers \x0d\x00\x0a\x00
as 1 character, whereas I'm interested in it as 4 bytes.
Any other editor (or viewer) which presents this basic information while displaying the text in a "normally" readable and searchable fashion is worthwile.
Even a hex view with a synchronized normal-text view would be okay, but a typical Hex-dump viewer/editor is not what I'm after, as they (typically) only display ASCII chars, and I haven't found a FOSS Hex-dump viewer/editor which can perform a simple text-mode search for non ASCII UTF-8 or for any UTF-16 strings.
I'm primarily concerned with legibility and search-ability of the text, so a "normal" Hex dump program is only a fallback (which I'm already using).