i presume you do not need to edit these files.
why not just use that which is best at interpreting the ansi sequences - the terminal itself?
you could write yourself a simple one-liner script that would invoke a terminal just to look at the file.
e.g.:
i already added a red fancy prompt. now you can influence the urxvt command for font type & size, window size & position etc.
should be sufficient?

Interesting idea, ondoho, and thanks for the suggestion.
For simply displaying ANSI styled text I'd use
I actually wanted to be able to edit the files though. I think the original poster wanted to too.

it doesn't make sense.
who ever wanted to edit log ifles?

and anyhow, in the end you'd be needing 2 separate views, one where you see the end result, and one where you can edit the "tags" (escape sequences);
or some sort of Wysiwig like on the forums here, with loads of buttons and dropdown menus... of course it's possible, but why?

ondoho, I don't want it for editing log files, but I can imagine situations where someone might want to edit a logfile to remove all the irrelevant parts and just keep the ones relating to some particular problem or experiment they're doing. Or perhaps they might want to highlight certain parts.

Wysiwyg editors are what I was looking for, and listed a few initial examples of. SyncDraw is the best I've found so far, though I'm still dissatisfied and searching for a better one.

For me, being able to edit ANSI text files is really useful. I had an example just this morning. On the bug-gawk email list yesterday someone suggested a simple way to visually check how a regular expression works:

grep -E --color 'pattern'

It's a really neat quick guide to help debug some patterns. As an example try the pattern 'j{1,3}as' on the text file:
Then try it again, but this time anchoring the expression to the beginning of each line '^j{1,3}as'

Because output is in color, if I want to make notes for myself about it (I make notes for myself about everything) then I have to either make my notes using ANSI text or HTML. HTML seems like overkill, especially since the original is in ANSI anyway.

More on your solution above for viewing ANSI text... it actually does a better job of displaying ANSI text than my suggestion of "less -R" does because the latter annoyingly resets the ANSI codes at the end of every line. Also "less -R" ignores position codes that are used in some ANSI art. So, thanks again for your suggestion.

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I have used ansi escape codes i .bat files under DOS & Windows so I would guess you could do the same with a bash file under Linux. If so a basic text editor would work. personally I like the Midnight Commander's text editor.

notmeagin, yep, I often include ANSI escape codes in my scripts. At the moment I do it exactly as you say, in a standard text editor (usually either leafpad or geany), but it would be nice to be able to enter colored or bold or underlined or italic text directly into the editor without having to constantly look up the codes and type them in. That is, using a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor. SyncDraw does this to some degree, but has some deficiencies that make it pretty unusable for me.