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Over the last few days I've been looking for a reasonable hex editor but so far it has been mostly hit and miss (and of that only miss actually)

Actually my only wishes for it are that it is displaying both hex and ascii side by side (standard column view) and that I can force it to split the file into lines that have a length that is a power of 2 or something reasonable like that (so far all I could find would split at whatever size would maximize screen utilization for the current window size)

Does anyone know such a tool or am I the only one with the second requirement.

UltraEdit is among the best all-around text editors available. Includes a hex-edit mode with freely configurable number of ASCII characters displayed per line. Available for both Windows and Linux.

It's not free, but IMHO well worth the money, as I haven't found a better text editor yet on either platform.

Yo,

I'm a lazy sort of person, and I work mostly off the command line since it's so cool and 1337, and it's more productive anyway. I recommend hexedit. "sudo apt-get install hexedit", or whatever your package manager equivalent is. It even has cool colours and all that when you pass certain command line options.

--Have fun,
gravaera.

At this point I am perfectly happy with my copy of gedit as a text editor, and frankly 60 euro for a hex editor is a bit much in my opinion. I'm still a student and don't have that much money available, especially with government plans here in the netherlands.

I agree with berkus - okteta is pretty nice.

I prefer non-graphical hex editors, dhex and hexcurse are my current favourites.

You could also try GHex

thanks for recomending hexedit, it works well as long as i don't resize my console screen. GHex actually doesn't allow you to select number of bytes per line and I haven't found a reasonable number that I can enforce with my current screen settings. As with okteta, it works but it kinda jumps arround my 9 virtual screens in the setup ubuntu gave me. However it does work rather nice (ie i can do what i want.)

Thanks all for replying

davidv1992 wrote:At this point I am perfectly happy with my copy of gedit as a text editor, and frankly 60 euro for a hex editor is a bit much in my opinion.

It's not 60 Euros for "a hex editor". UltraEdit can do virtually everything you would ever want to do with a text editor, including project views, open-remote-file-via-FTP/SSH, go-to-definition, lists of function declarations, search-and-replace with RegEx support, a powerful macro language, customizable syntax highlighting for virtually every programming language out there, whatever. You'd never look for another text editor again.

I understand when people say "I cannot afford this". I can accept when people say "I don't use software that is not 'free'". All I say is that, in my eyes, UltraEdit is well worth the money. Feature-wise on par with VIM and Emacs, and spades more user friendly.

berkus wrote:It's like Kate, but for 60 euros

Yeah, blanket statements in a thread about text editors. That's not flame-bait-ish at all.

I admit that my last experience with Kate was in a time when they already removed the project plugin (3.5?), but did not yet have the ctags integration backported from KDevelop, so my dismissal of Kate is based on some kind of "historic low" of that noteable.

I also use the UEdit macro feature frequently, so I'm a bit biased in that regard. (Yes, I can do Perl. No, it's not comparable.)

Personally I'm a long-time emacs fan, but I'm investigating this new editor called Sublime.

Really nice interface, Google Chrome-like tabs, and fully python scriptable. I'm just working out if I can transfer all of my emacs functionality to it before I buy the licence.

Unfortunately, there is NO good, GUI'ed, real, free hex editor for linux...
So I written wxHexEditor. Also works on Win and OSX and could open files/devices up to exabyte size..
http://wxhexeditor.sourceforge.net

I don't inspect okteta deeply but biggest advantage is, wxHexEditor does NOT loads whole file to memory, so you are not limited with your ram, could open any file that you can read, including devices up to exabyte size... I primarily built it to inspect big AVI files for DivFix++ and Meteorite.
Also you do not to use temp file if you want to insert/delete from a big file. I mean you can add 100 byte middle of the a GB file on the fly.
You can add tags/bookmarks and has x86 disassembler built in.

Slow? It's not like on my VM.
I use VirtualBox to compile it and it looks like really fast and reactive to cursor movements.
Cursor doesn't blinks if you don't has focus to hex window, as normally. But might be add a semi transparent cursor with blinking one in next versions...

What Mac OS do you have?
Could you check what version do you download? v0.11 or v0.10 ?
I forgot to set default download to v0.11 for mac osx computers. Probably you downloaded v0.10.
Could you try with v0.11 ?