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Comparison of hex editors

Topic: Software

 From HandWiki - Reading time: 4 min

Short description: None


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 2021 Win95, WinNT4 and up No No
010 Editor Yes No Proprietary 16.0.2 2025 Yes Yes Yes
beye No Yes GPL-2.0-only or GPL-3.0-only 6.1.0 2009 Yes Yes Yes
Cheat Engine Yes No Proprietary freeware 7.2 2021 Yes Yes, ver. 6.2 No
GNU Emacs Yes Yes GPL-3.0-or-later 29.1[1] 2023 Yes Yes Yes
FlexHex Yes No Proprietary freeware for personal use 2.7 2018 Windows XP and up No No
Hiew No Yes Proprietary 8.81 2024 Yes No No
ImHex Yes Yes GPL-2.0-only 1.35.4 2024[2] Yes Yes Yes
VEDIT Yes Yes Proprietary 6.24.2 2015 Yes No No
UltraEdit Yes No Proprietary 26.10 (Windows)
18.0 (Linux / Mac OS X) 		2019
2018 		Yes Yes Yes
WinHex Yes No Proprietary 21.0 2023 Win95 and up No No
Vim Yes Yes Vim 9.1.0[3] 2024 Yes Yes Yes

Features

Template:Sort-under

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[4] 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 [5] Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
beye 8 PiB Yes No Yes Yes ANSI, EBCDIC, ASCII, Macintosh Yes 29 [6] AVR, Java, x86, i386, x86-64, ARM/XScale, PowerPC, PPC64 Yes No
Emacs 2.3 EB[7][8][9][10] No Unknown No No No No Yes Yes[11] Unknown No No Unknown Unknown Yes[12] Yes
FlexHex Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes ANSI, OEM, UTF-16 Yes 2 [13][14] No Yes No Yes No
Hiew 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 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 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Partial support of these formats: ANSI, UNICODE, OEM, UTF-8/UTF-16, EBCDIC, ASCII Yes 44 [15][16] Only x86 Intel opcodes Yes Yes and replace Yes[17] No
vim Limited by RAM No No No No Yes[18] Yes ASCII, ISO-8859, DOS (OEM), UTF-8, UTF-16, partial EBCDIC (compilation required), unicode Yes No No Yes[19] No Plug-in[20] Yes Yes
ImHex Unlimited Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Shift-JIS, Custom Yes 143 [21] Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes 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. ↑ "GNU Emacs". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/. 
  2. ↑ "Releases · WerWolv/ImHex". https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/releases. 
  3. ↑ "Vim 9.1 released : Vim online". https://www.vim.org/vim-9.1-released.php. 
  4. ↑ HxD features
  5. ↑ "010 Editor - Binary Template Repository". SweetScape Software Inc.. https://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/repository/templates/. 
  6. ↑ "beye / Code / [r238 /newtwindow-branch/src/plugins/bin/"]. https://sourceforge.net/p/beye/code/HEAD/tree/newtwindow-branch/src/plugins/bin/. 
  7. ↑ "GNU Emacs 23.2 NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/NEWS.23.2. 
  8. ↑ "Buffers". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Buffers.html. "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." 
  9. ↑ "Does Emacs have problems with large files?". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/Problems-with-very-large-files.html. 
  10. ↑ "GNU emacs manual - Narrowing". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Narrowing.html. 
  11. ↑ "Special Input for Incremental Search". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Special-Isearch.html. 
  12. ↑ "Bookmarks". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Bookmarks.html. 
  13. ↑ "User-defined Data Fields". Inv Softworks LLC. http://www.flexhex.com/product/tour/data_fields.phtml. 
  14. ↑ The file "FlexHEX\Structures\Disk.fsd" of FlexHex 2.71 installation contains example parsers for FAT and NFTS file system headers
  15. ↑ "Additional Templates for WinHex & X-Ways Forensics". X-Ways Software Technology AG. https://www.x-ways.net/winhex/templates/index.html.  lists ~30 formats.
  16. ↑ WinHex 20.6 release package "winhex.zip" contains 14 template files with ".tpl" suffix with parsers for various storage system formats.
  17. ↑ WinHex: Scripting
  18. ↑ :help eval
  19. ↑ vimdiff
  20. ↑ vim-bookmarks
  21. ↑ "ImHex-Patterns". https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex-Patterns. 



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