martinus / hexler

Fast colorful hex dumper, written in Rust

hexler - A colorful hex printer with opinionated defaults

hexler is a simple hex viewer. Its most distinguishing features are:

• Automatically uses whole terminal width
• colorized output
• Defaults to using a pager (same as e.g. git)
• Writes code page 437 characters for better readability

I wrote this program mostly to get experience with Rust. There are more powerful tools (e.g. hexyl) and faster ones (e.g. hastyhex). Nevertheless, I prefer

Similar Programs

• TSCD https://github.com/fosres/TSCD
  • Red: non-printable
  • Orange: printable (Alphabetic)
  • Yellow: Base 10 digits
  • Green: ASCII Whitespace
  • Purple: Punctuation Characters
  • Gray: NUL
• hastyhex https://github.com/skeeto/hastyhex
  • green: Whitespace (0a, 0b, 0c, 0d, 20)
  • Blue: printable (21-7e)
  • yellow: nonprintable
  • gray: NUL
• hexxy https://github.com/sweetbbak/hexxy
  • 256 different colors
• xxd
  • some colorization
• xd https://bitbucket.org/delan/xd/src/default/
  • gray & whilte
  • prints ALL characters!
  • xd --example
• hexyl https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl
  • looks powerful, and beautiful!

Number of bytes written when printing a random binary

Printing a 181 MB executable, tested with e.g. time hexler --stdout filename >/dev/null or |wc -c

MB to console	Runtime	app	sampe output
2004	2.210	hexler	00004e80: 74 72 45 76 00 5f 5a 4e 53 74 38 69 6f 73 5f 62 trEv._ZNSt8ios_b
2729	1.002	hastyhex	00004e80 74 72 45 76 00 5f 5a 4e 53 74 38 69 6f 73 5f 62 trEv._ZNSt8ios_b
2745	24.213	hexyl	│00004e80│ 74 72 45 76 00 5f 5a 4e ┊ 53 74 38 69 6f 73 5f 62 │trEv⋄_ZN┊St8ios_b│
4195	4.371	hexxy	0004e80: 7472 4576 005f 5a4e 5374 3869 6f73 5f62 trEv._ZNSt8ios_b
4757	5.354	xxd	00004e80: 7472 4576 005f 5a4e 5374 3869 6f73 5f62 trEv._ZNSt8ios_b
8598	24.213	tscd	00004e80: 74 72 45 76 00 5f 5a 4e 53 74 38 69 6f 73 5f 62 trEv·_ZNSt8ios_b