Monday, June 15, 2020

hexV


hexV is a little tool that I've been working on for a while.
It's a tiny viewer that shows the content of any file in hexadecimal.
Something like this:



I first thought about making hexV while I was working on another project that involved parsing and rendering large images without using any official libraries like libpng. I needed something that I could use to learn and understand how images are structured and stored depending on the type (PNG, JPEG, BMP...), and also that'd help me debug the parsers I wrote for that project.

hexV did the trick. Instead of having to go through endless console output to chase bugs, I could simply open the processed image with hexV and compare it to the values read by the parsers. I'm pretty sure that using hexV saved me a ton of debugging time.

The first version of hexV had builds for both windows and linux, but I recently added some deep changes to the linux version so I removed the windows build until I can make some time to add those changes to it.

I have some interesting features in mind, like file type detection, that I'd like to add sometime soon. 
Oh, and this is an open-source project, so if you find hexV interesting and feel like collaborating, take a look at the issues and hack away!


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