What is a good HEX editor on Linux?

A hex editor is different from a regular text editor in that the former displays the raw binary content of a given file, without applying any text encoding or typesetting. A hex editor can be useful in various cases, e.g., repairing disk image and partition, reverse-engineering binary code, patching emulator ROM files, analyzing malware, etc.

In this tutorial, I introduce a HEX editor called wxHexEditor which is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS X.

wxHexEditor Features

wxHexEditor offers a number of powerful features.

• 64-bit file descriptors supporting files or devices of up to 2^64 bytes.
• Extremely fast with handling large files by not copying the whole files to RAM.
• Can handle multiple byte insertions or deletions without creating a temp file.
• Low memory footprint (e.g., 25 MB memory for opening multi GB files).
• Disassembly support for x86, x86-64, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, AMD-V, Intel VT-x.
• Support for process memory editing.
• Can handle XOR-based obfuscation.
• Multiple views to show multiple files.
• Support for multiple encodings (e.g., UTF8/16/32, Shift JIS, GBK, EUC, etc).

Install wxHexEditor on Linux

To install wxHexEditor on Debian, you can build wxHexEditor from its source as follows.

$ sudo apt-get install debhelper libdisasm-dev libmhash-dev libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev wx-common wx2.8-headers
$ svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/wxhexeditor/code/trunk wxHexEditor
$ cd wxHexEditor
$ make OPTFLAGS="-fopenmp"

On Ubuntu, wxHexEditor is available via GetDeb Apps repositories. To installwxHexEditor on Ubuntu:

$ wget -q -O - http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-getdeb apps" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list'
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install wxhexeditor

To install wxHexEditor on Fedora, build it from its source as follows.

$ sudo yum install libtool gcc-c++ wxGTK-devel
$ svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/wxhexeditor/code/trunk wxHexEditor
$ cd wxHexEditor
$ make OPTFLAGS="-fopenmp"

To install wxHexEditor on CentOS or RHEL, first enable Repoforge repository, and then follow the same procedure as in Fedora.

/lib/libgbm.so.1: undefined reference to `wayland_buffer_is_drm'

If you encounter the above build error on Fedora, updating mesa-libgbm package solves the problem.

$ sudo yum install mesa-libgbm