Expect to pay thousands of dollars, and expect the vendor to require you to use a dongle to enforce copy protection. X-Ways is crazy powerful, as well as crazy expensive.

create templates to easily find and manipulate structures in your data.For zero to moderate cost you get abilities like: This is the mid-range set of hex editors, and here I would classify HxD, WinHex, and Hex Workshop.The result is typically bare-bones, but it will work if you have no other option. Any programmer’s text editor (pretty much anything more sophisticated than NOTEPAD.EXE) will allow you to open files in hex editing mode.I would describe the landscape of hex editors by classifying them into three different categories: There is a Wikipedia article that fancies itself as the authority on hex editors, but it only scratches the surface of what is available out there. So the point of a hex editor is to allow the user to just see and manipulate the 0x4E, ignoring numeric translations like ASCII or EBCDIC. Take the number 0x4E-does that mean “N”? Well, that’s what 0x4E means in ASCII, but in EBCDIC 0x4E means “+”. Rather, the point is that you’re looking at raw data without a filter, or translation of the data.įor example, ASCII is a translation of data. However, the point isn’t that you’re looking at numbers in hexadecimal after all, these programs allow the user to select other number formats like octal or decimal. “Hex editor” is a bad name because it puts the emphasis on just one of many possible view formats: viewing numbers in hexadecimal. First, a definition: what is a hex editor? It is a program that allows you to edit raw data, which means data without any translations applied to it.

Hex workshop v4 23 exe