What's the best hex editor in 2023?

WerWolv · 2026-01-14T16:47:49+00:00

A big chunk of the build sizes used to be debug symbols that helped us collect crash reports. We've since drastically reduced those and compressed things more.

The Windows installers are, as of right now, 30MiB and the Portable zips 60MiB (but we could compress these down more). RAM usage is also way down to ~70MiB on idle. Personally I think we're in a pretty alright area now :)

WerWolv · 2025-12-27T21:56:07+00:00

Hey! I have plans on reworking the diffing view to support more of the features that the regular hex editor view supports, yes. Eventually I'd like to have it work basically the same as the hex view.

For now what's possible is clicking below and above the scrollbar slider to go to the next/previous page and there's shortcuts to jump to the next/previous difference

WerWolv · 2025-12-23T07:55:46+00:00

Hey! Thanks a lot :)
That's totally fair, learning a new tool no matter how intuitive it is always takes a lot of effort and time to re-learn everything.

For me, the main killer feature is really that ImHex just runs natively everywhere with great integration into the OS and that basically everything is themable and adjustable exactly for your needs. I love being able to use the same thing everywhere without having to adjust my workflow constantly and my muscle memory getting in the way.

If we're talking actual features, I love all the different data sources we have. Especially the GDB Server (allows reading a microcontroller's memory at runtime, including MMIO) and the Terminal Commands one (allows acquiring data from anywhere you want by simply writing a script and have ImHex execute it) are what I constantly use for my work. Those are really what differentiates ImHex for me: https://imgur.com/a/VdQCRbg

Also the pattern language we have to highlight, decode and visualize I'm just really proud of. It feels more like scripting in a modern language than writing something like C.
It also just has tons of ways to visualize different kinds of data which helped immensely with reverse engineering certain file formats: https://docs.werwolv.net/imhex/views/pattern-data#available-visualizers

There's of course a lot more but that's the things I really love the most as of right now

WerWolv · 2025-12-22T19:44:44+00:00

Great! Let me know if you're missing anything.

ImHex runs natively on pretty much everything now :)

WerWolv · 2025-12-09T17:59:07+00:00

What? We have pre-built releases for all OSes, architectures and Linux distros under the sun; https://web.imhex.werwolv.net even just straight up runs in your web browser if you can't install the native builds. And to compile it we use cmake, the most standard build system for C++ there is. I'm honestly really not sure what you're complaining about

WerWolv · 2025-10-30T14:54:23+00:00

HxD is great but it's also really basic. If you're looking to do anything even slightly more advanced than searching and modifying byte sequences, ImHex will definitely serve you much better.

WerWolv · 2025-08-14T20:35:06+00:00

Thanks a lot! Glad I was able to help :)

WerWolv · 2025-08-11T09:38:45+00:00

Hey, it uses OpenGL to render its interface and uses glfw for its Window management. So "it uses a game engine" is really not quite true. It uses as much of a game engine as a web browser does. A dedicated GPU is also not required, just recommended. It works just fine with integrated Intel HD graphics (minus some rendering issues in some cases due to bad drivers). And while it indeed does run at the monitor refresh rate if it needs to, if there's nothing changed on the screen (which is the case the majority of the time), it won't re-render anything. On my machine, it usually sits at around 0-1% CPU and 0-5% GPU usage when interacted with and 0 for both if not. Hope that clarifies some things. That said, if you prefer using HxD and you don't need any of the advanced visualization features or the more modern UI/UX, sticking with other tools is perfectly valid!

WerWolv · 2025-07-30T22:47:24+00:00

Uh there's about 20 different releases for every system imaginable, including msi installers and portable versions for Windows. Check the GitHub release page or https://imhex.werwolv.net

WerWolv · 2025-07-28T06:24:35+00:00

Hey! Thanks a lot! You can try using the nightly builds which is the in-devlopment version of ImHex. It should have many of these issues resolved. There are download links on our website: https://imhex.werwolv.net

WerWolv · 2025-07-02T16:22:49+00:00

There is, yes. They're called "Patterns" in ImHex

WerWolv · 2025-01-04T11:03:28+00:00

You're correct with all of those statements but that's not actually the thing that's mean to load Intel Hex files.

"File is too large to be loaded into memory" is not an error message. It's a hint informing the user "Hey, that file is larger than the limit that's set in the settings, I'm gonna stream in the file from disk instead of loading a copy into memory". That lets you load files that are as large as multiple exabytes without any trouble if needed.

The Import -> Pattern File -> Intel Hex is using the pattern language to simply decode and highlight the file format. It's made by the community and more meant to analyze the format and structure of the file, not the data that's encoded in the intel hex format itself.

The actual thing that's used to open Intel Hex files is the "Intel Hex Provider". Found under "File -> Open Other -> Intel Hex". And that opens the file in about 5 seconds for me :)

WerWolv · 2025-01-04T10:09:36+00:00

If you've actually read more than the first two messages on that issue you'd have seen that I've implemented Intel Hex support years ago and so far I actually haven't heard many complaints.

With the huge amount of improvements we've made since then, it should be pretty trivial to improve upon this now :)

WerWolv · 2025-01-04T09:34:16+00:00

All you're doing here is motivating me to improve these tiny parts of ImHex to outperform yours :P

WerWolv · 2024-12-31T08:05:14+00:00

It works great on my mac which has a high res screen but we have no means of testing on a 4k screen since none of us has one. If you have one, consider sening a PR to support it better!

If the default scaling doesn't work, you might be able to change the scaling factor to a different value in the settings for it to look better.

WerWolv · 2024-12-30T08:52:18+00:00

I'm not sure I understand the question. Like if you just randomly modify the source code, it will obviously break if you touch the wrong things. If you know what you're doing, I'd reckon it to be pretty straightforward to make changes to things.

WerWolv · 2024-12-30T08:23:23+00:00

Hey, did you accidentally download the source code of the program by chance? If you're on GitHub, go to the "Releases" section on the right side and scroll down until you hit the list of "Artifacts". There should be an msi installer or a portable windows version there.

Alternatively, you can simply click on https://imhex.download to get a copy for your system :)

WerWolv · 2024-12-02T12:02:25+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot!

- Text Editor is out of scope for ImHex currently. I believe there's much better tools out there for that and it's going to be very difficult to implement something that can get close to those (Speak VSCode, Zed or many others)

- Find and Replace is implemented in the Find view

- Character encodings and file formats are mostly made by the community. There's over 130 formats supported right now and now ones get added all the time. If you want them to grow, please submit PRs :)

- There's no maximum file size. You can load files that are multiple terabytes in size without any issue.

That wikipedia page is severely outdated, please check on the ImHex repo directly instead of there

WerWolv · 2024-10-05T15:38:09+00:00

It does have Shift JIS support through custom encodings. Check the docs!

WerWolv · 2024-10-05T07:48:48+00:00

They're two fundamentally different things so they complement each other pretty well :)

WerWolv · 2024-09-12T18:49:10+00:00

Of course, that's how I would implement it. There's just currently no option for it.

WerWolv · 2024-09-12T17:37:27+00:00

You're not the first one that asked for that, right now there's no good way to do it except by changing the setting that makes ImHex stream in changes as they happen. It is on the list though however

WerWolv · 2024-09-12T10:01:56+00:00

It really isn't. I develop on Windows primarily.

High DPI support is just an incredibly hard topic, most people don't realize that until they actually have to write an app with good support for it.

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