hexyl — A Colorful Command-Line Hex Viewer

What it is

hexyl is a small, fast command-line hex viewer written in Rust. It color-codes bytes by category: ASCII printable characters, whitespace, non-ASCII bytes, and null bytes each get a distinct color. This makes binary file inspection significantly more readable than traditional hex dump tools.

It targets developers, reverse engineers, and sysadmins who frequently inspect binary files, firmware images, or data formats from the terminal.

How it saves time or tokens

hexyl's color coding lets you spot patterns in binary data at a glance. Instead of squinting at raw hex output from xxd or od, you immediately see where ASCII strings, padding, and non-printable regions are. The --skip and --length options let you jump to specific offsets without loading the entire file.

How to use

1. Install hexyl:

brew install hexyl
# Or on Linux:
cargo install hexyl

1. View a binary file:

hexyl /bin/ls | head

1. Inspect a specific offset range:

hexyl --skip 4096 --length 64 file.bin

Example

# Install
brew install hexyl

# View first 256 bytes of a binary
hexyl --length 256 /usr/bin/file

# View bytes at offset 0x1000
hexyl --skip 4096 --length 128 firmware.bin

# Pipe from stdin
curl -s https://example.com/image.png | hexyl --length 64

Output uses colors: blue for ASCII, green for whitespace, yellow for non-ASCII, and dim gray for null bytes.

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Key considerations

When evaluating hexyl for your workflow, consider the following factors. First, assess whether your team has the technical prerequisites to adopt this tool effectively. Second, evaluate the maintenance burden against the productivity gains. Third, check community activity and documentation quality to ensure long-term viability. Integration with your existing toolchain matters more than feature count alone. Start with a small pilot project before rolling out across the organization. Monitor resource usage during the initial adoption phase to identify bottlenecks early. Document your configuration decisions so team members can onboard independently.

Common pitfalls

• Piping hexyl output through a pager that does not support ANSI colors (like plain less) strips the color coding; use less -R instead.
• Very large files output extensive data; always use --length to limit output or pipe through head.
• Terminal themes with light backgrounds may reduce contrast for some byte categories; adjust terminal colors if needed.