What is a good Windows hex editor / viewer?

Question

I am in need of a hex editor / viewer (viewer is more important than editing, but a plus if it can edit) for Windows.

See KHexedit

Requirements:

• Free is best
• View data at cursor as: byte, short, int, long, float, double (signed/unsiged where applicable)
• Configure the endiance for multi-byte decoding

"Nice to have" features:

• String decoding, null-term or selection based, ASCII/UTF-8/16
• Create user defined "structures" to overlay and view fields

Answer 1

I've never found one that I really love. I tend to go searching every time I need one. However, I will point you toward two links:

Wikipedia: Comparison of Hex Editors
Wikibooks: Windows Hex Editors

Answer 2

I'm a big fan of fhred. It's free and it's met most of my requirements over the years.

Answer 3

I can's swim in Windows without PSPad.

• Fast
• Tabs
• Syntax hilighting
• Hex editor

Answer 4

I use HEdit. I've used it for years. It's fast and free. It has most of the features you want.

Hex Workshop has all the features you want (like Integrated Structure Viewer) but it's $90.

Answer 5

If you already use Notepad++ there's a Hex Editor plugin.

Answer 6

UltraEdit is a wicked hex editor, as is HIEW (though HIEW does look like DOS, which might turn you off). Unfortunatley they're both shareware, so require a license.

If you're looking for free, you could take a gander at Cygnus. It's not huge on features, but it's quick and it works.

Answer 7

I'd strongly recommend UltraEdit. It's not free (beyond the 45 day trial), but it's very very good and I don't mind paying for something I use so regularly.

Some of my favorite/most used features;

• Hex editing / viewing (inc find/replace/insert/remove)
• Source code highlighting / formatting
• Integrates with the Windows shell
• Tabbed interface
• Basic file/folder diff built in (you can pay for a more expensive diff package)
• List item Macros / Scripting
• Freely converts back and forth between line endings and ANSI/UTF-8/UTF-16 etc

Answer 8

HxD is great. :)

http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Answer 9

gvim -b file.bin

:%!xxd to view hex

:%!xxd -r to convert back

Answer 10

I've always been a fan of XVII:

http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm

Answer 11

I spent some time looking for a good editor a while ago and finally settled on ICY Hexplorer:

http://hexplorer.sourceforge.net/

Free/GPL and has some other "advanced" features like custom data structures, pixel view, etc.

Answer 12

It's not my everyday hex editor, it's a bit specialized, but MadEdit is the best Unicode editor I've seen, especially when dealing with weird encodings or a file that's gotten borked via multiple encodings. And it has a hex mode which is especially good at making it obvious exactly which bytes are being interpreted as which characters. It's nothing special in hex mode if you're just editing bytes or ASCII, but it's free (GPL), fast with large files, multi-platform, and is great when you need unicode support.

http://madedit.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://madedit.sourceforge.net/wiki/images/9/90/Screenshot03.png

Answer 13

When I need a hex editor on Windows, I always reach for WinHex.

It's not free, but it meets all your other requirements, and does about a million other things besides.

I write and maintain software that images logical volumes under Windows, so Winhex's ability to open a physical disk or logical volume is very handy. It also has built-in decoders for common on-disk structures like NTFS MFT, MBR, etc. Building your own is easy too.

I've tried all sorts of free editors/viewers, and always come back to WinHex.

Answer 14

I've always used UltraEdit but I've shifted toward Notepad++ recently

Answer 15

If you have Visual Studio, you already have a Hex Editor (albeit fairly basic and without some of the features mentioned):

1. Do File > Open then select your file.
2. Don't click Open, but click the down arrow next to it.
3. Select Open With then choose the Binary Editor.

Source for this tip: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1724586/can-i-hex-edit-a-file-in-visual-studio

Answer 16

A good, simple hex editor comes as a plugin for notepad++

You can download the plugin dll from sourceforge

Answer 17

Many of the above recommended hex editors (including HxD) do not meet the OP's requirements:

• View data at cursor as: byte, short, int, long, float, double (signed/unsiged where applicable)
• Configure the endiance for multi-byte decoding

A free solution that does is KDE's Okteta. A Windows installer for KDE can be found here. The kdeutils package contains Okteta.