Thread: Looking for Hex Editor with bit inspection capabilities

  1. #1
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Looking for Hex Editor with bit inspection capabilities

    Hello everyone,

    As many of you probably already know (if you don't, you are about to), Hex Workshop has a structure viewer which is excellent for inspecting and edit data as a set of data types based around the C standard types. For the common serialized objects, for instance, this means you can look at - and edit - a binary file by looking at data as meaningful structures. You just need to define how the data is to be looked at by mimicking your serialized class or struct in a C-like script file that you load into Hex Workshop. Very cool. Especially because the script language is feature-happy.

    Anyways... </shameful promo>

    However, it can't help me much if my data has meaning at the bit level, instead of byte level. Which is the case here since I would like to easily inspect and possibly edit data that I'm generating as a series of bit-arrays of unsigned long length each.

    As such I'm looking at something close to Hex Workshop structure viewer, but capable of working at variable-lenght bit level. If you do know of a tool that does it, do let me know. This is probably outside the scope of an Hex Editor; the name alone is a giveaway. So this is probably why I'm not finding what I want.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  2. #2
    Frequently Quite Prolix dwks's Avatar
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    I've never used Hex Workshop, so I don't know how applicable this is, but perhaps the program you're looking for is a binary editor.
    dwk

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  3. #3
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Thanks dwks. They are basically the same thing. However searching for "binary editors" as suggested places 010 Editor in the top of the list and the features list refers support for bitfields. I'll check that one out.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

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