hexyl

hexyl is a command-line hex viewer written in Rust by David Peter (sharkdp, the same author as bat and fd). With over 9,500 stars as of 2026, hexyl provides a colorful, user-friendly alternative to the traditional xxd and hexdump tools for inspecting binary files in the terminal. The output format displays each line with: a byte offset (shown in gray), the hex representation of 16 bytes (with different colors for different byte types: null bytes in dark gray, printable ASCII characters in cyan, ASCII whitespace in green, and other non-printable bytes in red, with bytes separated by spaces and the line split into two 8-byte groups for readability), and the ASCII representation (showing printable characters directly and dots for non-printable bytes). Key features include: color-coded byte types using ANSI 256-color or true color (24-bit) output with automatic terminal capability detection, customizable output (no-colors mode, plain mode without grouping, and configurable column width), support for various input formats (standard input via pipes, regular files, and block/character devices), byte range selection with --skip (starting offset) and --count (number of bytes to display), configurable number of bytes per line (--bytes 8/16/32), bytes per group (--grouping 1/2/4/8 for endianness-aware display), block size for separators (--block_size), function mode (--functions) showing symbolic function call patterns, and endianness support (--endianness little/big for multi-byte grouping). hexyl is designed to be fast (capable of viewing multi-gigabyte files without lag due to buffered I/O) and handles non-seekable inputs (pipes) correctly. Available via Homebrew, apt, cargo, and Scoop. Licensed under MIT/Apache-2.0.