hex-view

Hex Viewer

Non-interactive hex dump of a file or byte range — offset + hex + ASCII, with the file's total size and sha256. Pure-Python stdlib, no dependencies.

When to use

You need to look at raw bytes: identify a file by its magic (7f 45 4c 46 = ELF, 4d 5a = PE/MZ, 50 4b = ZIP/JAR, de c0 variants, etc.), inspect a header or a suspicious offset, confirm an embedded payload, or pull a byte snippet into a report. This is a viewer, not an interactive editor — it prints offsets and snippets so a human or an agent can reason about them without opening a TUI.

What it does

Reads a slice of the file and prints a classic hexdump, or a structured JSON of the same rows. It is strictly read-only: it never imports, parses as code, or executes the input — safe on hostile binaries.

Usage

rekit run hex-view ./suspicious.bin                       # first 256 bytes
rekit run hex-view ./suspicious.bin --offset 512 --length 128
rekit run hex-view ./suspicious.bin --length 0            # whole file (capped 1 MiB)
rekit run hex-view ./suspicious.bin --format json         # structured rows for tooling

Text mode (the view is the output):

file: suspicious.bin  size: 40 bytes  sha256: 9f2c...
showing 40 byte(s) at offset 0 (0x0)
00000000  7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.ELF............|
00000010  02 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 65 76  |..>.....hello ev|

JSON mode prints {ok, path, offset, length, totalBytes, sha256, truncated, rows:[{offset, hex, ascii}]} — handy for embedding byte snippets (with offsets) into a report.

Prerequisites

• python3 ≥ 3.8 — the only requirement, and it's pure stdlib, so there is no local runtime to build.

Options

--offset (negative = from end) · --length (0 = whole file, capped at 1 MiB) · --width (bytes per row, default 16) · --format text|json.