// the find
sharkdp/hexyl
A command-line hex viewer
hexyl is a terminal hex viewer that color-codes bytes by category — NULL, printable ASCII, whitespace, other ASCII, non-ASCII — so you can visually parse binary data without squinting at a wall of monochrome hex. It's a modern replacement for xxd and hexdump from the author of bat and fd. Aimed at developers and sysadmins who regularly poke at binary files, protocol dumps, or compiled artifacts.
The byte-category coloring is the real value here — spotting a null-terminated string or a non-ASCII byte cluster is instant rather than mental. It's packaged in essentially every package manager that matters (apt, dnf, pacman, brew, nix, cargo), so you can get it on any machine without friction. The color scheme is configurable via environment variables, which is the right call — no config file needed for a simple override. CI is solid and the project tracks Rust stable.
It's read-only — if you need to patch a byte or two you're back to xxd piped through vim or a dedicated editor. No struct-aware parsing or named-field overlays, so for anything beyond raw bytes (ELF headers, PE format, custom binary protocols) you'll hit its ceiling fast. No binary diff mode, which is a common next step when you're already hex-viewing a file. The codebase is thin enough that there's not much to learn from architecturally — it's essentially a formatting loop with color state.