GNU hexedit vs REHex

GNU hexedit is a free Linux terminal program for viewing and editing file contents as hexadecimal values or ASCII text. It can read a device piece at a time, search forward or backward for strings in either representation, and save edits. Selection commands allow marking, copying, pasting, saving a copied region to another file, and filling a selected area with a string. The --sector option displays whole sectors and makes scrolling advance sector by sector. Keyboard commands control the terminal interface; --color works only when supported by the operating system. Changes remain in memory until saved, so large fill operations may trigger a warning. Read-only files cannot be changed and are reported as non-writable. The author describes hexedit as open source under the GNU General Public License. The maker page links to source archive 1.6, while Git builds use ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make. It supports disk editing but has no binary comparison, templates, scripting, or plugins.

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.