Bless vs wxHexEditor

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.

wxHexEditor is a free hex and disk editor for examining and changing binary data, with a particular focus on large files on Linux. It uses 64-bit file descriptors and supports files or devices up to 2^64 bytes. The site reports about 25 MB of memory use with multiple files larger than 8 GB open, without copying the whole file into RAM. You can insert or delete bytes without creating a temporary file, compare binary files and merge nearby results, and use its integrated x86 disassembly. It can open devices on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X for disk and sector editing; raw sector editing can be used to work on partition tables and filesystems or recover data. Other tools include many encodings, checksum functions, XOR operations, color tags, and saving selections as dump files. Downloads are listed for Linux, Mac Intel, and Win32. The latest release event listed on the home page is version 0.24 Beta, dated December 31, 2017. The site’s supported languages are English, Turkish, and partially Russian.