Looking for a good hex editor for linux

katto · 12-19-2010, 10:27 AM

Lets see what we have until now.
lde - Works out of the box, a bit old and unmaintained but it will probably do the job.
wxHexEditor - Very pretty gui and with some extra features I wanted but I can't compile or run the binary.
okteta - Very pretty as well but other than some random crashes it can't work on destroyed ntfs filesystems. Shame.
bpe - I compiled it and had a look. Seems alright, although I didn't try to load the disk in it to see if it supports it.
hexedit - I just tried it and although it looks alright it can't load the disk.

Thanks for the effort though barriehie. I will have to put some more testing into bpe to see if it can work with my disk.

E.U.A. · 04-12-2011, 05:16 PM

Hi guys,
wxHexEditor author here.
Katto, Firstly I am sad about you can't compile the wxHexEditor. It's too simple. I couldn't believe that you cant compile it from source. Just install wxWidgets-devel (or libwxgtk-dev on ubuntu?) than enter the wxHexEditor source directory and "make" that's all! You don't needed to "configure" anything. You can also use "static binaries" at download area. They work even if you don't have wx libraries on your system. For open your hdd partitions, you needed to run wxhexeditor as a root or needed to give that partition to readable rights. Than you can open that partition.

If you have any problems with wxHexEditor, I suggest you to fill tracker at source-forge.
http://wxhexeditor.sf.net

Quote:

Originally Posted by katto

Nope no staleness there. Can it be true that linux doesn't have a good hex editor as the author says? Unbelievable. Well it certainly seems nice. I will have a proper look at it tomorrow, thanks.

Believe or not, I couldn't find one. If I found, I don't write one from scratch!

Quote:

Originally Posted by allend

I think the term you want is "sector editor" rather than "hex editor".
Linux has perfectly good hex editors e.g. okular in a GUI, bpe at the command line

The issue that the writer of wxhexeditor highlights is the lack of large file size support. What is not understood is that within Linux it is easy to extract the region of interest into a small file and work on that, then put that segment back.
The dd command is your friend.

There is no need to work directly with large files.

Yes, true if you know what you are doing... But what if you want to reverse engineer a file/structure/disk? Your approach doesn't work with it.

I make wxHexEditor for myself for inspecting huge AVI files (to make avi repair/preview tool at www.divfix.org), than used for reverse engineering MKV structure on 4GB files... With it, I could make world first Matroska file repair tool, Meteorite ( http://meteorite.sf.net ). There is no similar tool before even on Windows. I believe it's wxHexEditor success. MKV structure/specs are open, doesn't needed to be reverse engineered. But when you add tags to mkv file locations and watch them how its working, you can imagine big picture in your brain and could easily produce program that fix problems...

Without it, I definitely couldn’t make them. I also can't imagine trying to understand MKV structure with dd command and ghex

Regards,
Erdem.

katto · 05-19-2011, 09:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by E.U.A.

Hi guys,
wxHexEditor author here.
Katto, Firstly I am sad about you can't compile the wxHexEditor. It's too simple. I couldn't believe that you cant compile it from source. Just install wxWidgets-devel (or libwxgtk-dev on ubuntu?) than enter the wxHexEditor source directory and "make" that's all! You don't needed to "configure" anything. You can also use "static binaries" at download area. They work even if you don't have wx libraries on your system. For open your hdd partitions, you needed to run wxhexeditor as a root or needed to give that partition to readable rights. Than you can open that partition.

If you have any problems with wxHexEditor, I suggest you to fill tracker at source-forge.
http://wxhexeditor.sf.net

Believe or not, I couldn't find one. If I found, I don't write one from scratch!

Yes, true if you know what you are doing... But what if you want to reverse engineer a file/structure/disk? Your approach doesn't work with it.

I make wxHexEditor for myself for inspecting huge AVI files (to make avi repair/preview tool at www.divfix.org), than used for reverse engineering MKV structure on 4GB files... With it, I could make world first Matroska file repair tool, Meteorite ( http://meteorite.sf.net ). There is no similar tool before even on Windows. I believe it's wxHexEditor success. MKV structure/specs are open, doesn't needed to be reverse engineered. But when you add tags to mkv file locations and watch them how its working, you can imagine big picture in your brain and could easily produce program that fix problems...

Without it, I definitely couldn’t make them. I also can't imagine trying to understand MKV structure with dd command and ghex

Regards,
Erdem.

Just saw that you posted. I can't really recall the details now about why I couldn't compile your editor. I'll try again after I switch distros though.