Open Source Hex Editors For Solaris?

An 0xAnonymous 0xCoward asks: "I just wasted a whole day looking for a good hex editor for Solaris. I finally had to give up in frustration and disbelief. I found several hex editors, sure, some of which were even decent, but none of them had the -one- feature I was looking for: when I highlight the hex, the corresponding ASCII should be highlighted at the same time and vice versa. The only one that came close to providing this was khexedit, which looks excellent, but which I couldn't get to work on Solaris because it requires the [Qt] library and god-knows-what-else from [KDE]. Anyway, I finally had to resort to using a hex editor in Windows, all of which seem to have this feature. This seems like such essential geek tool...it must exist somewhere!"

this is lacking

[johnjones]

I find that mention that you would like a GUI to edit these things and people laugh and ask if you have seen ed (-; but it IS a very good way represent the data

I would like to see what this turns up as I cant find one anywhere !!

cheers

john jones

bvi anyone

[platinum]

bvi (binary vi) at http://bvi.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] works well under Linux and FreeBSD, and appears to be fairly portable. If you like vi, bvi is great.

Biew

[cowbutt]

BIEW [sourceforge.net] is definitely the way to go. It runs on a curses console and even understands x86 assembly in Win32 PE and ELF binaries.

Although admittedly, I've never tried to compile it on Solaris...

Try heck

[Craig Davison]

heck [lssi.net] works beautifully.

I had to hack it a little bit to get it to build (Solaris 2.6/sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10):
- comment out #include <bits/stdio_lim.h> in heck.c
- modify the heck target in Makefile to statically link /usr/local/lib/libncurses.a

You may notice LINUX in the build messages, but that's only there for gcc-isms.

VIM

[NateKid]

VIM actually has a hex editor mode (thanks to the xxd utility) that does what you're talking about. From command mode type :%!xxd to convert a file to hex format and type :%!xxd -r to convert it back.

Re:VIM

[NateKid]

Actually, VIM's default behaviour isn't to edit on both sides of the file (hex and ascii) simultaneously. However some versions (specifically the one that came with Slackware 7.1) do this automatically. Cheers, Nate

ghex

[xiox]

I find ghex is great - it's GUI, and uses the open source gnome libraries.

ftp::/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/ghe x/ ghex-1.1.4.tar.gz

Re:Emacs

[RGRistroph]

I was about to post that, but I didn't immediately see how to do the one feature that he asked for -- highlight an area in hex and highlight the same area in the ascii display. I've been looking for documentation on hexl mode, I can't believe that it is impossible.

Maybe there is some piece of elisp floating around out there on usenet ?

I would ask this question on one of the emacs or xemacs news groups.

Just use the tool unix admins used for years...

[danpbrowning]

Octal Dump, and split the ascii output to another tty!
od $filename | tee od -a > tty2
:-)

Emacs

[cooldev]

When it doubt, Emacs will probably do it.

hexl-mode is pretty decent.

Re:Emacs

[cooldev]

On my version (20.7 under Win2k) it does exactly that by default. I have the regular cursor I can use in either area and there's a faded cursor synchronized in the other section.

Quick and easy install for Qt & KDE under Solaris

[helixblue]

Grab the packages from ftp://ftp.patriots.net/ works great for me.. even adds it to the dtlogin choice. You may get perturbed at the Patriots logo there though.

Warning though, Qt will by default use your "default depth" (ala background), so you may need to change that.. I documented this and other things this last weekend at http://chaotical.ly/chaoswiki/index.php?Solaris

Why there are no official KDE packages? who knows.

Emacs

[Zachary Kessin]

Emacs has a hexl mode that will do hex very well. I use it from time to time.

The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.