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This seems interesting and is coincidentally exactly what I need right now. My trusty file, strings, hexdump and xxd all failed me. I was going to use ghidra, but it's quite the beast and I haven't had any time to learn it yet. Gonna give this a try tonight.

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What do you need Ghidra for?

Ghidra is, for the most part, not a hex editor. It’s meant for reverse engineering - mainly decompilation, but it’s useful for patching as well. The debugger is new and takes some getting used to (I’m still using GDB + Ghidra), but the disassembler and decompiler are top-notch.

It’s also useful for defining data structures and carving them up, which (for me) is the role now filled by ImHex.

If HexFiend/xxd are at one end of the spectrum, ghidra at the other, I imagine ImHex and tools like Kaitai are in the middle

Hex Fiend does data structures and file formats now too, using parsers written in TCL. I’d probably rate Hex Fiend as being in the middle too, especially if you’re going to put xxd at the low end :)

Personally, for file format parsing I like to use Hachoir (specifically Hachoir-wx for GUI file structure browsing), which is a somewhat obscure bit of software that I’ve made some contributions to.

Huh interesting, thanks for the recs!

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