hexyl

hexyl is a command-line hex viewer written in Rust. It displays file contents as a colored, formatted hex dump — distinguishing null bytes, printable ASCII, whitespace, and non-ASCII bytes with distinct colors so you can understand the structure of a binary file at a glance.

It is part of the same family of tools as bat, fd, and hyperfine — all by the same author, all sharing a philosophy of clear output and sensible defaults.

Features

• Colored output — different byte categories are colored distinctly: null bytes, printable ASCII, whitespace, and high bytes each get their own color
• ASCII panel — a right-hand column shows the printable ASCII representation of each row
• Clean layout — offset, hex pairs, and ASCII columns are neatly aligned and easy to scan
• Range selection — view only a specific byte range within a file with --skip and --length
• Custom grouping — control how bytes are grouped per column with --panels and --group-size
• Pipe-friendly — reads from stdin when no file is given

Installation

cargo install hexyl

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt install hexyl

# Fedora
dnf install hexyl

# macOS
brew install hexyl

# Arch Linux
pacman -S hexyl

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hexyl

Usage

# View a file
hexyl file.bin

# View the first 256 bytes
hexyl --length 256 file.bin

# Skip the first 512 bytes, then show 128 bytes
hexyl --skip 512 --length 128 file.bin

# Read from stdin (e.g. inspect a download)
curl -s https://example.com/file.bin | hexyl

# Inspect the first few bytes of any file
hexyl --length 16 /usr/bin/ls

# Show bytes in groups of 1 (no grouping)
hexyl --group-size 1 file.bin

Example output

Running hexyl --length 64 /usr/bin/ls on a Linux ELF binary produces output like:

┌────────┬─────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┬────────┬────────┐
│00000000│ 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 ┊ 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 │•ELF•••⋄┊⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄│
│00000010│ 03 00 3e 00 01 00 00 00 ┊ 00 10 40 00 00 00 00 00 │•⋄>⋄•⋄⋄⋄┊⋄•@⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄│
│00000020│ 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ┊ f0 aa 02 00 00 00 00 00 │@⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄┊ו•⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄│
│00000030│ 00 00 00 00 40 00 38 00 ┊ 0d 00 40 00 1e 00 1d 00 │⋄⋄⋄⋄@⋄8⋄┊•⋄@⋄••••│
└────────┴─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┴────────┴────────┘

The ELF magic bytes (7f 45 4c 46) are immediately visible in the printable ASCII column as •ELF.

Color categories

Tips

• Pair with hexyl and grep to search for byte patterns in binary files
• Use --skip and --length to navigate large binary formats without loading the whole file
• The ELF header, PNG magic bytes, ZIP local file headers, and other binary format signatures are instantly recognisable with colored output