wxHexEditor, your new large, 16EBs (exabytes) large, file editor?

beta news - Open files of any size with wxHexEditor

The PC world has plenty of hex editors; does it really need another? Our first thought was probably not, but that was before we’d spent a little time with the fast, feature-packed and extremely capable wxHexEditor.

Some hex editors have annoying limits on file sizes, for instance. But not this one. WxHexEditor can handle files up to 2^64 in size, that’s 16 billion gigabytes, which will probably be enough for the foreseeable future.

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There are plenty of other interesting options hidden away in the menus. We found tools to compare two files and highlight the differences; calculate a host of checksums (MDx, SHAx, RipeMDx, HAVALx, TIGERx and more) for any given view; back up, restore or erase the contents of any device.

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wxHexEditor

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WxHexEditor isn't limited to files. Click Devices > Open Disk Device and you can also open one of your drives and browse through its sectors. (Try running the program as an administrator if a particular drive isn't listed.)

Whatever you've opened, wxHexEditor allows you to view its contents. You can search for text or hex values, manually edit bytes or run search and replace operations (files are by default set to Read-Only, reducing the chance of accidental alterations).

And despite its lowly 0.22 version number, wxHexEditor has even more options hidden away in its menus. You can calculate 25+ checksums for any given file, for instance, or compare two files and highlight any differences.

Verdict:

As a beta it needs to be used carefully, but wxHexEditor is already a very powerful tool, fast and packed with essential features.

wxHexEditor

Events:

• Version 0.22 Beta Released (09/05/2013)
  • Now, supporting many codepages/encodings, including almost all DOS, ECBDIC, Windows CPs.
  • Also supporting multi character codepages like Shift JIS, UTF8/16/32 and others....
  • Added gksu and gksudo support for easy privilage elevations.
  • Added Russian translation, non-complete. (by Nikolai Novikov)
  • Fixed MacOSX binary issues that appears at old version due wx2.9
  • Many bug fixes also some usage changes.
• Version 0.21 Beta Released (01/01/2013)
  • Device and Partition Backup/Restore and Erase tools.
  • Customizeable hex panel formatting.
  • Customizeable colours!
  • Linux Process Memory Read/Write access.
  • MultiLocale support with Turkish Language
  • Options Panel
  • Fixed Hex control input

Features:

• It uses 64 bit file descriptors (supports files or devices up to 2^64 bytes , means some exabytes but tested only 1 PetaByte file (yet). ).
• It does NOT copy whole file to your RAM. That make it FAST and can open files (which sizes are Multi Giga < Tera < Peta < Exabytes)
• You can work with delete/insert bytes to file, more than once, without creating temp file!.
• Could open your devices on Linux, Windows or MacOSX.
• Memory Usage : Currently ~25 MegaBytes while opened multiple > ~8GB files.
• Could operate with file thru XOR encryption.
• Has multiple views to show multiple files in same time.
• Has x86 disassembly support (via integrated udis86 library) to hack things little faster.
• Has colourfull tags to make reverse engineering easier and more fun.
• You can copy/edit your Disks, HDD Sectors with it.( Usefull for rescue files/partitions by hand. )
• Sector Indication on Disk devices, also has Go to Sector dialog...
• Formated CopyAs! It's easy to copy part of a file in HEX format for C/C++ source, ASM source, also supports HTML,phpBB and Wiki page formats with TAGs!!
• Supports Hex or Text editor alone operation.Also can disable Offset region.
• Supports customizeable hex panel formatting and colors.
• Allows Linux Process Memory Editing operations
• Comparison of binary files, allows merge of near results.
• Supports ***many*** encodings including almost all DOS/Windows/MacOS CPs and multi-character sets like UTF8/16/32, Shift JIS, GBK, EUC_KR...
• Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal and LBA ("Sector+Offset") addressing modes, (switchable one to another by right click of mouse on Offset panel.
• Save selection as a dump file feature for make life easier.
• "Find Some Bytes" feature for quickly find next meaningful bytes at file/Disk
• MD/RIPEMD/SHA/TIGER/HAVAL/CRC/ADLER/GOST/WHRILPOOL/SNEFRU checksum functions (via integrated mhash library.)
• Import & Export TAGs support from file.
• Written with C++/wxWidgets GUI libs and can be used with other OSes such as Mac OS, Windows as native application.

Every so often I need to open some pretty big files and always seem to have to search for an app each time. Caching this here so the next time I can give this one a try. Besides being able to open some pretty big files (16 EB... awesome) I dig some of it other features, like the hashing and device access.

On yeah, it's open source too...