2.7 KiB
hex
hex is yet another hex viewer. It automatically interprets fields within files using a set of Lua scripts, colorizing them and showing descriptions on the side.
At the moment there aren’t that many features and we only have a few decoders.
Packages
Regular releases are sporadic. git master should be stable enough. You can get a package with the latest development version from Archlinux’s AUR.
Building and Running
Build dependencies: CMake, pkg-config, help2man, liberty (included),
termo (included)
Runtime dependencies: ncursesw, libunistring, Lua >= 5.3 (for highlighting)
$ git clone --recursive https://git.janouch.name/p/hex.git $ mkdir hex/build $ cd hex/build $ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug $ make
To install the application, you can do either the usual:
# make install
Or you can try telling CMake to make a package for you. For Debian it is:
$ cpack -G DEB # dpkg -i hex-*.deb
Note that for versions of CMake before 2.8.9, you need to prefix cpack
with
fakeroot
or file ownership will end up wrong.
Having the program installed, optionally create a configuration file and run it on a file of your choice.
Configuration
Create ~/.config/hex/hex.conf with contents like the following:
colors = { footer = "" footer_hl = "bold" bar = "reverse" bar_hl = "reverse bold" even = "" odd = "" selection = "reverse" }
Terminal caveats
Terminals are somewhat tricky to get consistent results on, so be aware of the following:
-
Xterm needs
XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
for the default bindings to work -
urxvt’s 'vtwheel' plugin sabotages scrolling
Performance
While the Lua API has been made considerably easy to write new decoders with, the design is far from efficient as we make tons of new formatted strings. Since we need Lua 5.3 features (64-bit integers), LuaJIT can’t help us here.
Similar software
-
https://codisec.com/veles/ can also highlight files but it’s not scriptable
-
https://bitbucket.org/haypo/hachoir/wiki/Home seems to be strictly hierarchical, which may not work for file formats like ELF
Contributing and Support
Use https://git.janouch.name/p/hex to report any bugs, request features,
or submit pull requests. git send-email
is tolerated. If you want to discuss
the project, feel free to join me at ircs://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.
Bitcoin donations are accepted at: 12r5uEWEgcHC46xd64tt3hHt9EUvYYDHe9
License
This software is released under the terms of the 0BSD license, the text of which is included within the package along with the list of authors.