Interactive console mode hex viewer

For the love of console programs ... this hex viewer looks a lot like a classic DOS program, and/but its user interface is somewhat inspired by the vim editor. For example, get built-in help by typing ':help'. You don't need to hit Esc like you would in vim.

You can search text by pressing '/' and search backwards with the '?' command, and you may search hexadecimal strings with 'x'. Jump to a particular offset using '@'. Use the arrow keys for recalling search and address history.

Use the number keys '1', '2', and '4' to select different views: bytes, words, and quads.

Hit 'p' to toggle the printing the values in the subwindow at the bottom. There's much more, so be sure to read the :help.

hexview can examine files as large as 256 TiB. I haven't been able to verify this though ...

If you don't like colors, hexview may be started with:

hexview.py --no-color

See hexview.py --help for more options.

Run the following command in a terminal:

python setup.py install

or use setup.py bdist to create a package.

Copyright 2016 by Walter de Jong [email protected]

• Automatically chooses 16 or 32 byte line width, depending on available screen space. This can be disabled with the --80 option.
• Installs a .bat file in your Python environment Scripts directory, so it can be used directly also on Windows.
• Toggle between codepages for byte -> character display. Currently, these are: latin-1, cp500 (EBCDIC) and cp437 (IBM extended ASCII)

Buyer beware: I rewrote the terminal text backing bytebuffer handling to use an array of unsigned ints. This eliminates the need for encoding and decoding each character value, but it may have unintended consequences.

Stein Pedersen [email protected] January 2025