When (rarely) using hex editors, one thing constantly comes to my mind: isn't base 16 arabic-roman numerals a bit awkward for "skimmable" overview? Color-coding indeed helps immensely there, but wouldn't simply letting bits and bops shine in eight bit clusters, resembling the "physical" shape of the eight-bit byte, be somewhat more readable?

We even have characters in the Unicode for representing 0..255 variations, actually two distinct groups: Braille (arguably a bit misuse for binary) and octants (accompanied by older predecessors). So what would be

    |65|97|66|98|67|99|32|126|32|72|101|108|108|111|44|32|109|111|109|33|32|240|159|166|132|

in base-10 or

    |41|61|42|62|43|63|20|7e|20|48|65|6c|6c|6f|2c|20|6d|6f|6d|21|20|f0|9f|a6|84|

in base-16, could be

    |⢈|⢊|⡈|⡊|⣈|⣊|⠂|⡾|⠂|⠌|⢪|⠮|⠮|⣮|⠦|⠂|⢮|⣮|⢮|⢂|⠂|⠛|⣵|⡣|⠡|

in Braille, or

    |𜵲|𜵶|𜴷|𜴻|𜶭|𜶱|𜴀|𜵯|𜴀|𜴋|𜶔|𜴭|𜴭|𜷟|𜴫|𜴀|𜶢|𜷟|𜶢|𜵴|𜴀|(⁕)|𜷢|𜵖|𜴙|

using octants.

Most significant bit is at the top left here, the least one is bottom right -- it felt somewhat intuitive to me this way, your intuition may differ, obviously.

Or, naturally, "AaBbCc ~ Hello, mom! <Unicorn Emoji>" as a "UTF-8" text.

Try: http://myfonj.github.io/tst/byte-dec-hex-braille-octant.html) Test (with added "CSS" variant and "highlight" of empty dots): http://myfonj.github.io/tst/byte-visualisation-exploration.h...

(⁕) HN apparently eats upper-half block. Amusing that only this particular ("old", as referred earlier) one got filtered out…

Also caveat: Android phones have messed-up Braille block due outdated broken embedded font, so all patterns with dots in the left half appear in the right instead. Long reported, not fixed, IIRC.