ImHex is amazing! It’s actively maintained, sponsored by FUTO, and is very hackable (both without recompiling, as well as modifying the grammars for others to take advantage of)

WOW!!!! if I had this when I had been working on Omnet connector to the HKEX, I would have win my life. I mean financial life, but still...

Does it do color highlighting by value of hex bytes, though?

Yes.

https://docs.werwolv.net/imhex#screenshots

as far as i can tell, no it does not. it only desaturates 00 in particular. the other colors you see in the screenshots come from matched formats/patterns. it does not do direct coloring based on byte value.

Under the Edit menu select "Highlighting Rules..." and you can define or load any set of rules you can imagine.

Thanks!

How many rules would it take to create 256 different colors for 00..FF?

ImHex++. I also can’t help but shill for 010 Editor, a commercial alternative that one might describe as a little less opinionated.

Yeah 010 is my go to (much cleaner for me)

Seems useful, and the UI is quite cute :-)

But - it's also kind of huge for a hex editor. Wouldn't it be overkill for most people?

Came here to reply with ImHex.

It really is by far the best hex editor I ever used, and sooo good for reversing arbitrary binary blobs where you learn incrementally more about its structure while reversing it. The imhex patterns repo [1] also contains so many formats, it makes binwalk almost useless in comparison.

[1] https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex-Patterns

That looks super cool! Now I just need a reason to look at hex files

This is a pretty common feature, isn't it? Binary templates, I mean. Even Hex Fiend has it.

Plus the built-in parsers for well known formats!

THANK YOU.

This is another fine tool I can add to my collection.

And FUTO! Love it.