ncurses-based hex editor with low memory footprint

By /robex/, December 2019. Back to Articles and Guides

Abstract

While doing some reverse engineering stuff on very large files I realized that there aren't any good terminal-based hex editors that allow you to edit directly in binary bases, or that allow you to insert and delete bytes without copying the whole file into a buffer.

Therefore, I decided to make one with ncurses. I plan to release it along with the source code (maybe) in the future, after I finish implementing all of the features I want and cleaning up the code a bit.

Features

For now, here is the list of features:

• Allows editing directly in hex, decimal, octal and binary.
• Supports files of up to 2^63 bytes of size.
• Supports tabs in order to edit multiple files at the same time.
• Very low memory footprint, under 1MB even when working with files over 100 GB.
• Allows inserting/deleting bytes without having a copy of the whole file in memory.
• vim-like shortcuts and navigation (insert/select modes).
• Runs on the terminal over SSH without any problems (supports window resizing).
• Supports color-coding bytes to aid in reverse engineering tasks.
• Supports extended ASCII character set.
• Many more features available in the program help.

Screenshots / Demo

The part everyone wants to see: