X-Hexplorer

Made as a portable version of ICY Hexplorer, this is a tiny software application that facilitates a user-friendly environment for inspecting the hexadecimal code of files, regardless of their type.

Since installation is not necessary, you can extract the program files anywhere on the disk and simply click the .exe to launch Hexplorer. Alternatively, you can store it to a USB flash drive to directly launch it on any PC with minimum effort.

As far as the interface is concerned, the tool adopts a normal-looking window with a neatly organized layout, where you can open a file to examine hex code and copy selected blocks of text as C or Assembler data, hex strings, filtered text, or disassembled code.

It's possible to increment and decrement bytes, negate a selection, find out the file's date information and special attributes, paste external text as is or as hex numbers, floats, doubles, bytes, words or double words, highlight a string of characters, or check out simple data types.

What's more, Hexplorer lets you view pixels, keep an eye on the disassembler, show a navigator, enter fullscreen mode, as well as display different types of structure, like DWORD, BMP or PE header, object table, or NTFS or FAT32 boot sector.

You can encrypt text using a password, find patterns and byte occurrences, calculate checksums (e.g. CRC32, MD5), record and play macro scripts for automated tasks, as well as export the file to a wide range of formats, such as ASCII hex, Atmel Generic (big or low endian), DEC Binary (XXDP), Elektor Monitor (EMON52), LSI Logic Fast Load, Inel hex, and Signetics. Likewise, data can be imported from the same file types.

The utility didn't hamper system performance in our tests, as it needed low CPU and RAM to function normally. It had a good response time to user commands and didn't hang, crash or display error messages.

To sum it up, Hexplorer provides users with advanced options to directly examine files via hex display. Plus, it's free and open-source.