 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2007) |
The following is a comparison of notable hex editors.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2007) |
The following is a comparison of notable hex editors.
| GUI | Console | Software license | Latest stable version | Latest release date | Windows | Macintosh | Linux | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HxD | Yes | No | Proprietary freeware | 2.5.0.0 | February 11, 2021 | Win95, WinNT4 and up | No | No |
| 010 Editor | Yes | No | Proprietary | 15.0 | July 31, 2024 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| beye | No | Yes | GPL-2.0-only or GPL-3.0-only | 6.1.0 | December 12, 2009 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| bvi | No | Yes | GPL-3.0-or-later | 1.4.2 [1] | March 7, 2023 | DOS, Win95 and up | Yes | Yes |
| Cheat Engine | Yes | No | Proprietary freeware | 7.2 | August 14, 2021 | Yes | Yes, ver. 6.2 | No |
| GNU Emacs | Yes | Yes | GPL-3.0-or-later | 29.1 [2] | July 30, 2023 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| FlexHex | Yes | No | Proprietary freeware for personal use | 2.7 | October 12, 2018 | Windows XP and up | No | No |
| Frhed (Free Hex Editor) | Yes | No | GPL-2.0-or-later | 1.7.1 | July 30, 2009 | Win98 and up | No | No |
| Hexer | No | Yes | BSD-3-Clause | 1.06 | April 24, 2020 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hiew | No | Yes | Proprietary | 8.81 | March 24, 2024 | Yes | No | No |
| ImHex | Yes | No | GPL-2.0-only | 1.26.2 | March 23, 2024 [3] | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| VEDIT | Yes | Yes | Proprietary | 6.24.2 | Jan 1, 2015 | Yes | No | No |
| UltraEdit | Yes | No | Proprietary | 26.10 (Windows) 18.0 (Linux / Mac OS X) | May 7, 2019 January 2, 2018 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| WinHex | Yes | No | Proprietary | 21.0 | December 13, 2023 | Win95 and up | No | No |
| Vim | Yes | Yes | Vim | 9.1.0 [4] | January 2, 2024 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Binary Ninja | Yes | Yes | Proprietary | 3.5.4526 [5] | September 15, 2023 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Maximum file size | Partial file loading | Disk sector editing | Process memory editing | Data inspector | Bit editing | Insert/delete bytes | Character encodings (ao) | Search Unicode | File formats | Disassembler | File compare | Find in files | Bookmarks | Macro | Text editor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HxD | 8 EiB [6] | Yes | Windows 9x/NT and up | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ANSI, ASCII, OEM, EBCDIC, Macintosh | Yes | No | Individual instructions only | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
| 010 Editor | 8 EiB | Yes | Yes | WinNT only | Yes | Yes | Yes | ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Custom | Yes | 279 [7] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| beye | 8 PiB | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | ANSI, EBCDIC, ASCII, Macintosh | Yes | 29 [8] | AVR, Java, x86, i386, x86-64, ARM/XScale, PowerPC, PPC64 | Yes | No | |||||
| bvi | Limited by RAM | Yes | Yes | Yes | ANSI, ASCII | No | No | Yes and replace | Yes | |||||||
| Emacs | 2.3 EB [9] [10] [11] [12] |  | Unknown | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes [13] | Unknown | No | No | Unknown | Unknown | Yes [14] | Yes |
| FlexHex | Unlimited[ citation needed ] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ANSI, OEM, UTF-16 | Yes | 2 [15] [16] | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | ||
| Frhed | Limited by RAM | Yes | No(read only) | Yes | Yes | ANSI, OEM | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | |||
| Hiew | Unlimited[ citation needed ] | Yes | WinNT only | Yes | Yes | Yes | ASCII, OEM, Unicode, custom | Yes | No | x86, x86-64, MMX, SSE 4.2, 3DNow! - all assembler, ARM | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
| VEDIT | Standard, 2 GiB, Pro 64, unlimited[ citation needed ] | Yes | DOS version only | No | Yes | Yes | ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ASCII, custom | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| UltraEdit | >4 GiB | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ASCII, Mac, Unix, UTF-8 | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| WinHex | Unlimited[ citation needed ] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial support of these formats: ANSI, UNICODE, OEM, UTF-8/UTF-16, EBCDIC, ASCII | Yes | 44 [17] [18] | Only x86 Intel opcodes | Yes | Yes and replace | Yes [19] | No | ||
| vim | Limited by RAM | No | No | No | No | Yes [20] | Yes | ASCII, ISO-8859, DOS (OEM), UTF-8, UTF-16, partial EBCDIC (compilation required), unicode | Yes | No | No | Yes [21] | No | Plug-in [22] | Yes | Yes |
| ImHex | 16 EiB | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Shift-JIS, Custom | Yes | 65 [23] | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Binary Ninja | Limited by RAM | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Official plugin | Official plugins | No | |
| Maximum file size | Partial file loading | Disk sector editing | Process memory editing | Data inspector | Bit editing | Insert/delete bytes | Character encodings (ao) | Search Unicode | File formats | Disassembler | File compare | Find in files | Bookmarks | Macro | Text editor |
ao: ANSI is the Windows character set, OEM is the DOS character set. Both are based on ASCII.
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter.
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A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE).
A hex editor is a computer program that allows for manipulation of the fundamental binary data that constitutes a computer file. The name 'hex' comes from 'hexadecimal', a standard numerical format for representing binary data. A typical computer file occupies multiple areas on the storage medium, whose contents are combined to form the file. Hex editors that are designed to parse and edit sector data from the physical segments of floppy or hard disks are sometimes called sector editors or disk editors.
This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.
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010 Editor is a commercial hex editor and text editor for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS. Typically 010 Editor is used to edit text files, binary files, hard drives, processes, tagged data, source code, shell scripts, log files, etc. A large variety of binary data formats can be edited through the use of Binary Templates.
A buffer's size cannot be larger than some maximum, which is defined by the largest buffer position representable by Emacs integers. This is because Emacs tracks buffer positions using that data type. For typical 64-bit machines, this maximum buffer size is 2^{61} - 2 bytes, or about 2 EiB. For typical 32-bit machines, the maximum is usually 2^{29} - 2 bytes, or about 512 MiB. Buffer sizes are also limited by the amount of memory in the system.