Show HN: HextEdit – A fast and native hex editor for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HextEdit – A fast and native hex editor for macOS

hextedit.app

88 pointsfinnv12 comments

I've really come to enjoy Synalyze It! while developing some media format decoders. It has grammars for a ton of file formats builtin.

Well worth the 90$ for the pro version if you spend a lot of time in a hex editor.

There's also 010 Editor, which has a very similar thing for creating file format grammars. Invaluable if you work with complex binary files regularly.

The scriptable functionality to decode a file format that this and Synalyze It do makes them my two favourite hex editors.

This hex editor looks like a great start, though :)

Nice! I work with a lot of binary data. Can you compare HextEdit vs HexFiend and what they’re each good at?

Same Q. I love HexFiend. It’s saved my bacon many times.

The main draw of HextEdit is the UI, it was designed to fit in with Big Sur, whereas Hex Fiend has some issues with elements cut off. They have similar feature sets, Hex Fiend has the added benefit of a diffing view, but I hope to add some more advanced features in the coming versions. I think HextEdit has some nice unique features that are expected of modern macOS apps, like version history and dark mode. They're both quite simple hex editors, and are both free!

What kind of things are you doing w binary data where an editor like this comes in handy?

For example reverse engineering and parsing binary file formats

This takes me back to the days of the early 00’s where much ROM hacking was done by hex editing, and maybe along with Tile Map Pro was any ROM hacker’s most valuable tool.

I spent many many hours messing around in Sonic 2; especially, first changing palettes, then creating custom level layouts; until the tools finally came around to compress / decompress the art found in various formats. :)

Now everything is mostly done with Assembly in those communities but there was a grace to the very delicate and fascinating art of editing ROMs directly in hex. :)

Anyone remember Norton Utilities Disk Editor? That thing was awesome, not only could you hex edit files, you could edit the filesystem too:

https://flylib.com/books/en/4.53.1.74/1/

These days I have no need to edit filesystems and for regular files I either use `hexdump -C` or Emacs hexl-mode.

I will definitely take a look at this as it looks interesting.

EDIT: I guess this is as good a reason as any to finally upgrade to Big Sur.

Lovely, useful tool; very well designed. Thank you!

0xED is another.

Really useful!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com