// the find
sharkdp/binocle
a graphical tool to visualize binary data
binocle renders binary files as color-mapped pixel grids so you can visually spot structure — embedded images, repeated patterns, compressed sections — without writing a script. It's a reverse-engineering tool in the tradition of cantor.dust and binvis.io, but runs natively on your desktop with an interactive GUI. Useful for firmware analysis, file format spelunking, or just satisfying curiosity about what's inside a large binary.
The colorization-by-datatype approach (integers, floats, entropy, etc.) is genuinely useful for spotting structured regions that would be invisible in a hex editor. The stride and width controls let you line up repeating structures visually, which is a good fit for finding embedded images or fixed-record formats. Written in Rust with a native GUI, so it's fast on large files where browser-based tools like binvis.io choke. Arch Linux extra repo inclusion and pre-built binaries mean zero friction to install.
The feature set has been essentially frozen since 2022 — the last release is v0.3.1 and the repo has 42 forks but almost no merged contributions, suggesting the author has moved on. There's no scripting or plugin surface, so you can't automate analysis or add custom colorization rules without forking. The GUI is built on an older egui version and the code is a single-author hobby project, which means bugs won't get fixed quickly. No entropy overlay or Hilbert curve view, both of which are standard in this genre and often more useful than rectangular grid layout for spotting compression boundaries.