hexler

A fast & colorful hex viewer with sensible defaults and terminal-friendly output.

hexler screenshot

Features

Terminal-aware: Automatically adjusts to full terminal width
Colorized output: Easy-to-read syntax highlighting for different byte types
Pager integration: Uses your system pager by default (like git and man)
Enhanced readability: Displays CP437 characters for better visual parsing
Fast: Can dump about 250 MB/sec colored output to the terminal

Why hexler?

While excellent tools like hexyl and hastyhex exist, hexler focuses on practical everyday use with reasonable defaults. Originally created as a Rust learning project, it's evolved into my go-to hex viewer for its clean output and terminal integration.

Installation

From Source

# Build from source
git clone https://github.com/martinus/hexler.git
cd hexler
make install

The binary will be available at ~/.cargo/bin/hexler.

Usage

# View a file with pager
hexler file.bin

# Output directly to stdout  
hexler --stdout file.bin

# Pipe to hexler
cat file.bin | hexler

Performance Benchmark

Output size and runtime when processing a 181 MB executable, tested with hyperfine --warmup 1 --show-output "hexler --stdout filename >/dev/null"

Runtime (s)	Tool	Comment
0.443	`hastyhex`	Doesn't print extended ASCII characters, no pager
0.820	`hexler`	Colors, prints extended characters, shows borders, automatically uses `less` pager, automatically detects terminal width
2.337	`xxd`	Colors, but no extended charcters, no pager
3.986	`hexyl`	Colors, shows borders, but no pager and no extended characters
4.826	`xd`	Prints extended ASCII characters, only grey, no pager
--	`hexxy`	Crashes on random data