Bless vs REHex

Bless is a free binary editor for editing files as sequences of bytes. It supports multilevel undo and redo, customizable data views, multiple tabs, and fast find and replace. The project highlights efficient handling of large data files and raw disk editing, with search and save operations running in multiple threads. Bless exports to text and HTML, while plugins can add other export formats and extend the editor. It is written in C# with Gtk# bindings for GTK+ and distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. GNU/Linux is the main target; listed supported platforms are Linux and Windows, and the README says it should also run on *BSD, Solaris, and Win32. Building the current version requires GTK+, a Mono/.NET runtime and C# compiler, Gtk# bindings, pkg-config, and Meson. The GitHub releases page has no releases, and the README provides source-build instructions. NEWS lists version 0.6.3 dated 2020-10-11. Saving a changed-size file under the same name requires temporary space for both files; same-size files save in place.

REHex is a free hex editor for reverse engineering and other work with binary data, available for Linux, macOS and Windows. It supports files larger than 1 TB, decodes integer and floating-point values, and displays machine-code disassembly inline. Users can compare whole files or selected regions side by side, map virtual addresses, and highlight or annotate byte ranges. Editing and analysis tools include bit editing, checksumming and bitmap visualization, along with common encodings such as ASCII, Unicode and ISO-8859-X. REHex imports and exports Intel HEX files. Binary Templates can annotate data automatically, while Lua scripting and plugins extend its functionality. Downloads include Windows installers and ZIP archives, a macOS DMG, and 32-bit and 64-bit Linux AppImages; packages are also documented for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, FreeBSD and openSUSE. The project identifies its license as GPL-2.0. The download page lists version 0.64.0, released on 2026-04-03, as the latest release. Bug reports and feature suggestions can be submitted as GitHub issues.