sjmulder / hxl

Small, optimised terminal hex viewer with colour coding, inspired by hexyl.

hxl

hxl [filename]

Simple hex viewer inspired by hexyl. I wanted to write a simple clone in C but got a bit carried away with optimisations.

A totally unscientific test with a ~420 MB video file on my Debian stretch machine with hxl 0.3.1:

$ time hexyl largefile >/dev/null
1m00.87s real     0m55.00s user     0m05.87s system
$ time ./hxl largefile >/dev/null
0m09.44s real     0m09.15s user     0m00.28s system

(Note: these measurements predate switching from -O2 to -O3 which improved performance by about 35%.)

The other major differences from hexyl are that hxl does not draw boxes around its output, does not use non-ASCII glyphs, and uses only basic VT100 sequences. This to enhance compatibility and composability.

Running

Should work on most Unix systems, including Linux, BSD, and macOS.

make
make install   [DESTDIR=] [PREFIX=/usr/local] [MANPREFIX=PREFIX/man]
make uninstall [DESTDIR=] [PREFIX=/usr/local] [MANPREFIX=PREFIX/man]

Author

Sijmen J. Mulder ([e-mail])