hexyl

hexyl is a hex viewer for the terminal. It prints the bytes of a file or input as a hex dump with a file offset column, and uses colored output to distinguish five categories of bytes: NULL bytes, printable ASCII characters, ASCII whitespace characters, other ASCII characters, and non-ASCII bytes. This makes structure in binary data, such as runs of zeros or text embedded in binary, visible at a glance.

Colors are configurable through environment variables: HEXYL_COLOR_ASCII_PRINTABLE, HEXYL_COLOR_ASCII_WHITESPACE, HEXYL_COLOR_ASCII_OTHER, HEXYL_COLOR_NULL, HEXYL_COLOR_NONASCII, and HEXYL_COLOR_OFFSET. Values can be any of the 8 standard terminal colors, their "bright" variants (e.g. bright blue), or RGB hex such as #abcdef.

hexyl is written in Rust and is packaged for many platforms, including Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Void, Gentoo, macOS (Homebrew, MacPorts), the BSDs, Termux, Nix, Guix, snap, and Scoop. On Windows, it needs a terminal that supports ANSI escape sequences, such as Windows Terminal. It is aimed at developers, reverse engineers, and anyone inspecting binary files or data from the command line.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install hexyl

# via apt
sudo apt install hexyl

# via Cargo
cargo install hexyl