Hallelujah! HexFiend 1.1 Ends My OS X Hex Editor Grail Quest!

Thomas Ptacek | August 31st, 2006 | Filed Under: Uncategorized

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OMG, PONIES! ridiculous_fish (an Apple AppKit developer) recently released HexFiend 1.1, driving a gleaming stake through the heart of HexEdit. Unlike HexEdit, HexFiend:

  • is fast,

  • is pretty,

  • has a floating inspector that decodes the int8/int16/int32/int64 (LE and BE) that you’ve highlighted (swoon),

  • often actually saves changes when you tell it to,

  • and can efficiently handle 100MB files —- like an uncompressed firmware image.

Despite these features, HexFiend had been my second choice hex editor. When I selected a range of bytes, it gave me the range of offsets (“104 through 107 selected out of 3,804 bytes”). This, believe it or not, is a showstopper; a few minutes of punching numbers into my rpn calculator to see how many bytes I’d actually selected was enough to throw me back into HexEdit.

Until now. Death to HexEdit! Long live HexFiend!

(Most ridiculous_feature ever: the inspector now shows you the RGB color corresponding to the bytes you have selected. I want to hear the use case for this. I am determined to find a way to use it in my work!)

I have, like, a million feature requests. I really wish he’d open it up. But HexFiend rules nonetheless, and ridiculous_fish has the thanks of grateful security company for releasing it.

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