fhex v3.0.4 releases: Full-Featured HexEditor compatible with Linux/Windows/MacOS

by do son · Published June 23, 2020 · Updated April 27, 2023

Fhex – A Full-Featured HexEditor

This project is born with the aim to develop a lightweight, but useful tool. The reason is that the existing hex editors have some different limitations (e.g. too many dependencies, missing hex coloring features, etc.).

Features

Search and replace (UTF-8, HEX, regex, inverse search supported) [CTRL + F]
Colored output (white spaces, ASCII characters, 0xFF, UTF-8 and NULL bytes have different colors)
Interpret selected bytes as an integer, long, unsigned long [CTRL + B]
Copy & Paste [CTRL + C and CTRL + V]
Copy selected Unicode characters [CTRL + Space]
Zeroing all the selected bytes [CTRL + D]
Undo & Redo [CTRL + Z and CTRL + Y]
Find & Replace
Drag & Drop (Hint: Drag&Dropping two files the editor will diff them)
Overwrite the same file or create a new one [CTRL + S]
Big files supported (Only on Linux, Windows has still several limitations on the supported file size)
Goto offset [CTRL + G]
Insert mode supported in order to insert new bytes instead to overwrite the existing one [INS]
Create new instances [CTRL + N]
Basic text viewer for the selected text [CTRL + T]
Reload the current file [F5]
Compare two different files at byte level
Browsable Binary Chart (see later for details) [F1]
Hex – Dec number converter [F2]
Hex String escaper (e.g from 010203 to \x01\x02\x03) [F3]
Pattern Matching Engine (see later for details)
Shortcuts for all these features

Pattern Matching Engine

Fhex can read a configuration file (from ~/fhex/config.json) in JSON format with a list of regex to highlight and a comment/label to add close to the matches.

An example that highlights urls with basic regex and emails:

{

    "PatternMatching":

    [

        {

            "regex" : "www.[a-zA-Z0-9].",

            "color" : "rgba(250,200,200,50)",

            "message" : "Found url"

        },

        {

            "regex" : "[A-Z0-9_!#$%&'*+/=?`{|}~^.-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+",

            "color" : "rgba(250,200,200,50)",

            "message" : "Found email address"

        }

    ]

}

To activate pattern matching press CTRL + P

Binary Chart

Fhex has the feature to chart the loaded binary file (Note: In order to compile the project, now you need also qt5-charts installed on the system). The y-axis range is between 0 and 255 (in hex 0x0 and 0xff, i.e. the byte values). The x-axis range is between 0 and the filesize.

The chart plots the byte values of the binary file and lets you focus only on the relevant sections. For example, if in a binary file there is an area full of null bytes, you can easily detect it from the chart.