Comparison of hex editors explained

The following is a comparison of notable hex editors.

General

	GUI	Console	Software license	data-sort-type="number"	Latest stable version	Latest release date	Windows	Macintosh	Linux
	HxD				2.5.0.0		Win95, WinNT4 and up
	010 Editor				15.0
	beye				6.1.0
	bvi				1.4.2^[1]		DOS, Win95 and up
	Cheat Engine				7.2			, ver. 6.2
	GNU Emacs				29.1^[2]
	FlexHex				2.7		Windows XP and up
	Frhed (Free Hex Editor)				1.7.1		Win98 and up
	Hexer				1.06
	Hiew				8.81
	ImHex				1.26.2	^[3]
	VEDIT				6.24.2
	UltraEdit				26.10 (Windows) 18.0 (Linux / Mac OS X)
	WinHex				21.0		Win95 and up
	Vim				9.1.0^[4]
	Binary Ninja				3.5.4526^[5]

Features

	Maximum file size	Partial file loading	Disk sector editing	Process memory editing	Data inspector	Bit editing	Insert/delete bytes	Character encodings^(ao)	Search Unicode	File formats	Disassembler	File compare	Find in files	Bookmarks	Macro	Text editor
	HxD	8 EiB^[6]							ANSI, ASCII, OEM, EBCDIC, Macintosh
	010 Editor	8 EiB							ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Custom		^[7]
	beye	8 PiB							ANSI, EBCDIC, ASCII, Macintosh		^[8]	data-sort-value="Yes"
	bvi	Limited by RAM							ANSI, ASCII					and replace
	Emacs	^[9] ^[10] ^[11] ^[12]								^[13]						^[14]
	FlexHex	Unlimited							ANSI, OEM, UTF-16		^[15] ^[16]
	Frhed	Limited by RAM		^(read only)					ANSI, OEM
	Hiew	Unlimited							ASCII, OEM, Unicode, custom			data-sort-value="Yes"
	VEDIT	Standard, 2 GiB, Pro 64, unlimited		data-sort-value="Partial"					ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ASCII, custom
	UltraEdit	>4 GiB							ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ASCII, Mac, Unix, UTF-8
	WinHex	Unlimited							support of these formats: ANSI, UNICODE, OEM, UTF-8/UTF-16, EBCDIC, ASCII		^[17] ^[18]			data-sort-value="Yes" and replace		^[19]
	vim	Limited by RAM					^[20]		ASCII, ISO-8859, DOS (OEM), UTF-8, UTF-16, partial EBCDIC (compilation required), unicode				^[21]		^[22]
	ImHex	16 EiB							ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Shift-JIS, Custom		^[23]
	Binary Ninja	Limited by RAM
	Maximum file size	Partial file loading	Disk sector editing	Process memory editing	Data inspector	Bit editing	Insert/delete bytes	Character encodings^(ao)	Search Unicode	File formats	Disassembler	File compare	Find in files	Bookmarks	Macro	Text editor

See also

• Comparison of HTML editors
• Comparison of integrated development environments
• Comparison of text editors
• Comparison of word processors

Notes

ao: ANSI is the Windows character set, OEM is the DOS character set. Both are based on ASCII.

References

1. https://bvi.sourceforge.net/download.html
2. Web site: GNU Emacs . . 2023-08-09.
3. https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/releases
4. https://www.vim.org/vim-9.1-released.php
5. Web site: Wiens. Jordan. 2023-09-15. Binary Ninja - 3.5: Expanded Universe. 2024-02-18. Binary Ninja.
6. http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ HxD features
7. Web site: 010 Editor - Binary Template Repository. SweetScape Software Inc.. 2022-10-05.
8. Web site: beye / Code / [r238] /newtwindow-branch/src/plugins/bin/]. SourceForge. 2022-10-05.
9. Web site: GNU Emacs 23.2 NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. .
10. Web site: Buffers. A buffer's size cannot be larger than some maximum, which is defined by the largest buffer position representable by Emacs integers. This is because Emacs tracks buffer positions using that data type. For typical 64-bit machines, this maximum buffer size is 2^ - 2 bytes, or about 2 EiB. For typical 32-bit machines, the maximum is usually 2^ - 2 bytes, or about 512 MiB. Buffer sizes are also limited by the amount of memory in the system..
11. Web site: Does Emacs have problems with large files? .
12. Web site: GNU emacs manual - Narrowing .
13. Web site: Special Input for Incremental Search . gnu.org.
14. Web site: Bookmarks . gnu.org.
15. Web site: User-defined Data Fields. Inv Softworks LLC. 2022-10-05.
16. The file "FlexHEX\Structures\Disk.fsd" of FlexHex 2.71 installation contains example parsers for FAT and NFTS file system headers
17. Web site: Additional Templates for WinHex & X-Ways Forensics. X-Ways Software Technology AG. 2022-10-05. lists ~30 formats.
18. WinHex 20.6 release package "winhex.zip" contains 14 template files with ".tpl" suffix with parsers for various storage system formats.
19. http://www.winhex.com/winhex/scripting.html WinHex: Scripting

20. help eval

21. vimdiff
22. https://github.com/MattesGroeger/vim-bookmarks vim-bookmarks
23. Web site: ImHex-Patterns. GitHub. 2023-01-29.

External links

• "Harry's Windows Hex Editor Review" (July 2002). harrymnielsen.tripod.com. Retrieved October 15, 2019.