ImHex: The Vision‑Friendly Open‑Source Hex Editor Taking GitHub by Storm

Overview

ImHex is an open‑source hex editor that provides a dark, colour‑highlighted UI for editing raw binary data. It displays file contents at the byte level, enabling tasks such as binary patching, format analysis, and reverse‑engineering.

Key Features

Hex view with byte‑level editing and patch management.

Copy selected bytes as C/C++/C#/Rust/Python/Java/JavaScript array literals.

ASCII‑art hex view and self‑contained HTML div export.

String and hex search with colour highlighting.

Goto start, end, or cursor position.

Custom syntax‑highlight language (C++‑like) for defining structures, enums, bitfields, pointers, arrays, and endian handling.

Automatic loading based on MIME type.

Rich error messages and syntax diagnostics.

Data import (Base64, IPS, IPS32) and export (IPS, IPS32).

Data inspection tools: multi‑type parsers, byte distribution, entropy graphs, and detection of encrypted/compressed files.

File hash utilities: CRC16/CRC32 (custom polynomials), MD4, MD5, SHA‑1/224/256/384/512.

Multi‑architecture disassembler (ARM32/ARM64, MIPS, x86‑16/32/64, PowerPC, Sparc, SystemZ, XCore, M68K, TMS320C64X, M680X, Ethereum).

Custom views, region highlighting, and annotations.

File‑magic database built from parsers and MIME types.

Utility tools: Itanium/MSVC demangler, ASCII table, regex replace, calculator, hex colour picker.

Built‑in cheat‑sheet for pattern language and mathematical evaluation.

Retina‑friendly dark theme with colourful syntax highlighting.

Compilation Requirements

ImHex must be built with a C++20‑compatible compiler (e.g., GCC 10.2 or newer). The following libraries are required and are available in standard package managers:

GLFW3

libmagic, libgnurx, libtre, libintl, libiconv

OpenSSL (libcrypto)

Capstone

LLVM demangle library (libLLVMDemangle)

nlohmann‑json

Python 3 (for scripting support)

Example installation commands:

# Arch Linux (pacman)</code><code>sudo pacman -S glfw file openssl capstone llvm llvm-libs nlohmann-json python</code><code># Fedora (dnf)</code><code>sudo dnf install cmake gcc-c++ capstone-devel glfw-devel glm-devel json-devel llvm-devel mesa-libGL-devel openssl-devel python-devel</code><code># MinGW (MSYS2)</code><code>pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-make mingw-w64-x86_64-capstone mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw mingw-w64-x86_64-glm mingw-w64-x86_64-file mingw-w64-x86_64-llvm mingw-w64-x86_64-nlohmann-json mingw-w64-x86_64-openssl

Build Instructions

mkdir build</code><code>cd build</code><code>cmake ..</code><code>make -j

Repository

Project URL: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex