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HEX Editor

Hex or hexadecimal editor is an application which allows viewing and manipulating binary files. It shows information in hex view which is a standard way of representing binary information. In a hex editor user can view and edit a file in its raw binary form.

When file is opened in hex editor first column typically represent an offset from the beginning of the file. More specifically it shows how many bytes from the beginning of the file were skipped to get to that specific line. Second column has actual byte values in the file. Third column shows textual representation of the binary information. Certain bytes in third column may be shown as empty spaces or dots since there are no visual symbol which can represent them.

If hex editor opened the file in editable view you will be able to directly modify bytes either by changing their hexadecimal representation or modifying text values.

Hex editor could be used to modify many different types of files including text file. Even though text files could be modified with text editors, sometimes they may use special symbols which could only be read and modified by hex editors. For example, each text file in UTF-8 encoding contains special symbols at the beginning of the file which specify that the file uses UTF-8. It is impossible to remove or correct these symbols from text editor (one saving the file with a different encoding will do it, but it may corrupt file encoding). On the contrary, hex editor will be able to show these bytes and modify them.

Besides displaying and modifying bytes hex editors can have multiple other very useful features. For example, iHex application for Mac OS used to generate screens above can show different kinds of checksums for the currently edited file, set bookmarks in a file, change file encoding, change byte grouping and more.