- https://github.com/0xeb/pyhiew/tree/main/bin/pyhiew - https://github.com/0xeb/pyhiew/tree/main/bin/pyhiew - https://0xeb.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/introducing-pyhiew/
It worked! I thought I was a genius. Now I'm amazed how I almost randomly got it right.
It's packaged for many Linux distros, and is on Homebrew
brew install ht
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072899
And if you don't mind paying, there's also "Synalyze It", which allows you to build the pattern language via the GUI:
I tried it a few years ago as a free alternative to 010editor and it was a bit unstable. But I see it is under active development, so maybe the issues have been fixed.
Hiew (Hacker's view) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18898214 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
(I tend to start with a standalone Python script which gets gradually customized over time. I don't even use a hex editor myself, and I just used xxd if I did really need hexdump for initial explorations. Of course I would comment that xxd output heavily in my editor, and that seems the best moment to use Hiew and clones.)
I like that font for binary files, it's more distinct than having a bunch of ? symbols for bytes 0-31.
The resulting glyph is the letter from the matching CTRL or ^ notation for that byte, but in a single character cell, and still distinct from a byte containing that letter.
So for instance, a NUL is value 0, which is CTRL+@ or ^@
But displaying ^@ screws up formatting, and displaying @ collides with byte value 64. Inverse video @ solves both, and doesn't need any special font. I do the same for DEL which is 127 displayed as inverse ?, but the ? is meaningful and adheres to the same rule because it's literally ^? not a placeholder for "no glyph" or "non-printing control byte"
Doesn't help you with configuring an editor but just describing a way to display those undisplayable bytes in a way that is actually meaningful & unambiguous and without caring what the font or even terminal type is. (ei: works the same in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model 100 or in bash on a xterm, or in c on windows, etc).
Here is an example of the font: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
But simply switching to that font in something like Konsole doesn't seem to be enough.
P.S. I still use it from time to time - it has a nice built-in assembler for x86/x86-x64.
[1] https://rizin.re
- Ghidra SRE (https://ghidra-sre.org/) from NSA
- https://x64dbg.com/ (spiritual successor of OllyDbg for Windows)
- https://github.com/eteran/edb-debugger (spiritual successor of OllyDbg for Linux)
- https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk
- https://github.com/kentavv/binary_viewer (spiritual successor of Cantor Dust)
- https://dogbolt.org/ (decompiler explorer)
You can even explore various histograms with `p=?` and `p==?` commands (they will print help for these).
Thank you!