I tried ImHex…found it way too complex for most of what I wanted to do. I’m still a huge fan of Hex Fiend on macOS - simple, fast, does what I want. I still haven’t found the perfect “simple” hex editor on Windows.
Interesting, I find HxD on Windows to be the absolute peak of hex editors with no real parallels on macOS or Linux. Which is a shame because I never use Windows.
Hex Fiend for instance is my hex editor on macOS, but why does it insist on reflowing the lines when I expand the window? I might just want to work with it maximized to avoid visual distractions, but I still only want lines to be 16 or 32 bytes long, and definitely not some weird size that will make things not line up.
I use HxD in Wine because I can't find anything that works better. I use and really like Imhex for what it is but it's a different kind of tool imho - more of a plugin canvas for analysis than just a hex editor with some bells and whistles.
Just wanted to mention that Hex Fiend is simply the fastest editor ever (on Mac). I threw gigabytes-sized files at it and it still manages to open them instantly, to the extent that I also use it as a plaintext editor in some extreme cases.
This is the other thing with HxD and I think it's very important for a hex editor, it handles huge amounts of data in the correct way. HxD can open entire block devices, or per-process/whole system RAM, and it all works without bogging down.
I've tried a lot of lesser hex editors that get cooked the moment you try to open a 4GB file. I don't know if the field I'm in skews this, but most of the time if I'm looking at a file in a hex editor, it's relatively large and I need to find a tiny amount of information in it.
