Comparison of hex editors

The following is a comparison of notable hex editors.

General

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 15.0.1 October 11, 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 Yes GPL-2.0-only 1.35.4 July 9, 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

Features

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 300 [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] Yes 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 Unlimited Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Shift-JIS, Custom Yes 143 [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

See also

Notes

ao: ANSI is the Windows character set, OEM is the DOS character set. Both are based on ASCII.

References

  1. ^ "BVI Binary VIsual editor: Download Page".
  2. ^ "GNU Emacs". GNU.org. Retrieved 2023-08-09.
  3. ^ "Releases · WerWolv/ImHex". GitHub.
  4. ^ "Vim 9.1 released : Vim online".
  5. ^ Wiens, Jordan (2023-09-15). "Binary Ninja - 3.5: Expanded Universe". Binary Ninja. Retrieved 2024-02-18.
  6. ^ HxD features
  7. ^ "010 Editor - Binary Template Repository". SweetScape Software Inc. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  8. ^ "beye / Code / [r238] /newtwindow-branch/src/plugins/bin/". SourceForge. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  9. ^ "GNU Emacs 23.2 NEWS -- history of user-visible changes".
  10. ^ "Buffers". 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.
  11. ^ "Does Emacs have problems with large files?".
  12. ^ "GNU emacs manual - Narrowing".
  13. ^ "Special Input for Incremental Search". gnu.org.
  14. ^ "Bookmarks". gnu.org.
  15. ^ "User-defined Data Fields". Inv Softworks LLC. Retrieved 2022-10-05.
  16. ^ The file "FlexHEX\Structures\Disk.fsd" of FlexHex 2.71 installation contains example parsers for FAT and NFTS file system headers
  17. ^ "Additional Templates for WinHex & X-Ways Forensics". X-Ways Software Technology AG. Retrieved 2022-10-05. lists ~30 formats.
  18. ^ WinHex 20.6 release package "winhex.zip" contains 14 template files with ".tpl" suffix with parsers for various storage system formats.
  19. ^ WinHex: Scripting
  20. ^ :help eval
  21. ^ vimdiff
  22. ^ vim-bookmarks
  23. ^ "ImHex-Patterns". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-01-29.