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you have to know how to program your own software to open files in that way...
you have to know the locations of data inside the file to read or edit...
using those programs you've named can only edit the bytes in the file... if you know
the exact location in the file the data is stored you can make changes to it...
the code you wrote would show up as 3 or 4 letters in the text side of the hex editor
and 6 or 8 letters in the hex side... so white color would be FFFFFF00 and the text
would be .... or blank in the text side

to be able to use the tr2_colour thing you have to build your own program,
then you can read those 3 or 4 bytes into that struct... tr2_colour is just the name
you wish to call the struct that holds the data, so its easy to know what it is later on...
then you can use code like tr2_colour.Red , tr2_colour.Blue, tr2_colour.Green
to get or set the value...

to set a value do
tr2_colour.Red = 255;

in c++ bitu8 is unsigned byte...
the value can only be 0 through 255...


example program code would be something like this...

typedef struct { // 3 bytes
unsigned byte Red; // Red component (0 ::= darkest, 255 ::= brightest)
unsigned byte Green; // Green component (0 ::= darkest, 255 ::= brightest)
unsigned byte Blue; // Blue component (0 ::= darkest, 255 ::= brightest)
} tr2_colour;

if(file.open("file.tr2"))
{
file.read(tr2_colour,sizeof(3));

//do something with the bytes

//tr2_colour.Red;
//tr2_colour.Green;
//tr2_colour.Blue;
// now holds the value from the file...

}
else
{
messagebox("error opening file");
}



i'm bad at explaining but hope you understand a little...
take care,
-Champ

it depends on what programming language you know or wish to learn... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages
most common i know that other tr programmers use are Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft Visual Basic, Delphi or Pascal...
i use Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 sp6 to program with in c++ and mfc code... you probably can do a search about software compilers
to find others, they have some free ones around i think also...
i'm not sure but i think tomb raider levels are compressed with zlib, so you have to get the zlib dll and header and add it to your program... http://www.zlib.net/
then use those functions to read the data and decompress it in memory... then you compress it back to file when done...
if you want to work with 3d objects in the file you need to learn about opengl or directX/direct3d, if you dont need to display any 3d stuff
you dont have to worry about those...http://www.opengl.org/

hope that helped some...
-Champ