Hexyl

Hexyl Plugin

A command-line hex viewer by sharkdp (fd, bat author). Pretty-print binary files with colored output.

Commands

Self

• hexyl self version — Print version

Hex

• hexyl hex view — View hex dump (passthrough: hexyl <file> [-n bytes] [-s skip])

Passthrough

• hexyl _ _ — Passthrough for any hexyl command

Usage Examples

• "Show the hex dump of this binary file"
• "Inspect the first 64 bytes of this WASM file"
• "View the file header of this PNG image"
• "Show me the binary content of this executable"

Installation

cargo install hexyl

Examples

# Basic hex dump
hexyl file.bin

# Read from stdin
cat file.bin | hexyl

# First N bytes
hexyl -n 64 file.bin
hexyl -n 4KiB file.bin

# Skip N bytes
hexyl -s 1024 file.bin
hexyl -s 0x1000 file.bin

# Combined: read 256 bytes starting at offset 512
hexyl -n 256 -s 512 file.bin

# Custom block size
hexyl --block-size 1024 file.bin

Key Features

• Colored output: different colors for different byte types
• ASCII representation column
• Smart byte grouping (4-byte nibbles)
• Column headers with offsets
• Supports stdin piping
• Binary and decimal offset notation
• Length and skip filters
• Block-size formatting