Hevi: A Hex viewer with style and advanced functionality

The world of hex viewers welcomes Hevi, a tool that promises to revolutionize binary file analysis by combining simplicity, customization, and advanced support. Designed as a modern alternative to traditional tools like xxd or hexdump, Hevi offers a fresh experience with useful features for developers and system analysts.

A Modern Take on Hex Viewing

Hevi, pronounced “heavy,” is more than just another hex viewer. Beyond visualizing content in hexadecimal format, it incorporates advanced features such as:

• Built-in Parsers: Hevi can interpret specific file structures like ELF or PE formats, providing syntax highlighting for better understanding of binary content.
• Customizable Color Palettes: Users can tailor the viewer’s colors with support for both standard ANSI and truecolor, enhancing the visual experience in the terminal.
• Flexible Filters and Configurations: Hevi allows you to fine-tune its display with options to enable/disable ASCII, skip identical lines, or toggle between uppercase and lowercase for hexadecimal values.

How to Use Hevi

The basic command to run Hevi is simple:

hevi <file> [flags]

Key available flags include:

• --color/--no-color: Toggles colored output on or off.
• --ascii/--no-ascii: Enables or disables ASCII interpretation.
• --parser: Specifies the parser to use, helpful for analyzing specific formats like ELF or PE.
• --show-palette: Displays the active color palette in a table.

Additionally, the viewer supports environment variables such as NO_COLOR, which disables colors globally, adhering to standards like no-color.org.

Custom Configuration

Hevi allows full customization via a .ziggy configuration file. This file includes fields like color, uppercase, or skip_lines, among others. Users can also define styles for color palettes, tailoring every visual aspect to their preferences.

The configuration file is stored in different locations depending on the operating system:

• Linux/macOS/BSD: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hevi/config.ziggy or $HOME/.config/hevi/config.ziggy.
• Windows: %APPDATA%/hevi/config.ziggy.

Installation and Cross-Platform Support

Hevi is available for multiple platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows. Users can install it via Linux package managers, download precompiled binaries from the release page, or build it from source using zig build.

A quick installation command for Linux and macOS is:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Arnau478/hevi/main/install.sh | bash

For users on other platforms, binaries can be downloaded from the project’s official GitHub page.

Built in Zig for Simplicity

Hevi is developed in Zig, a modern programming language that emphasizes simplicity and performance. This makes the viewer lightweight and efficient, ideal for binary analysis tasks in Unix and Windows environments.

A Project in Constant Evolution

Hevi’s roadmap includes future improvements like support for macOS and RHEL-based systems, syntax coloring for logs, and compatibility with Windows events via PowerShell. Additional features, such as remote support via SSH, are also in the works.

Open to Contributions

Hevi is released under the GPL v3 license, and the project welcomes community contributions. Interested developers can help by reporting issues, testing the tool, or implementing new features.

For more information or to download Hevi, visit the official GitHub repository: Hevi on GitHub.