Edit Hex in the Browser

If you can’t stand the thought of using an application in your browser, you might as well jump ahead to the comments and start flaming.

Still with us? Imagine this scenario. You are at the office, at a client’s site, at a school, or visiting your mom. Suddenly, for some strange reason, you need to edit a hex file. We don’t know why, but if you are reading Hackaday, it isn’t that big of a stretch to imagine it. What do you do? Download and install a hex editor? Maybe you can’t. Or, if it is mom’s computer, maybe you just don’t want to. Your next option is to navigate to HexEd.it.

The application, by [Jens Duttke], uses HTML5 and JavaScript and is actually a nicely capable editor. It shows the data in hex and ASCII as you’d expect. It also shows the current cursor location in a number of formats like 8-bit integer, 32-bit integer, date and time, and more. It even shows all the representations as big endian and little endian.

The tool can scan the file to match it with almost 7,000 file types for automatic identification, and there is a very nice search feature, as well. You can hide some of the inspector formats if you like and you can export your changes to your local hard drive.

According to the site, they don’t send any of your data to their web server and they don’t use memory to store the entire file, so large file editing is possible. About the only feature we didn’t see was the ability to read and write common formats like Intel hex or Motorola S-record files. You could use a tool like srec_cat to convert those files to binary (and back), but if you could do that you could probably load a regular hex editor, too.

The design and usability of HexEd.it is good. If you are into editing binary files in your browser, you might also want to disassemble code there, too. If you are wondering what you would do with a hex editor, you probably missed this post.

Filed under: software hacks

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