ImHex – A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers And Programmers

Stella Sebastian
Posted by Stella Sebastian February 28, 2021

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A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people that value their eye sight when working at 3 AM

Features

  • Featureful hex view
    • Byte patching
    • Patch management
    • Copy bytes as feature
      • Bytes
      • Hex string
      • C, C++, C#, Rust, Python, Java & JavaScript array
      • ASCII-Art hex view
      • HTML self contained div
    • String and hex search
    • Colorful highlighting
    • Goto from start, end and current cursor position
  • Custom C++-like pattern language for parsing highlighting a file’s content
    • Automatic loading based on MIME type
    • arrays, pointers, structs, unions, enums, bitfields, using declarations, little and big endian support, conditionals and much more!
    • Useful error messages, syntax highlighting and error marking
  • Data importing
    • Base64 files
    • IPS and IPS32 patches
  • Data exporting
    • IPS and IPS32 patches
  • Data inspector allowing interpretation of data as many different types (little and big endian)
  • Huge file support with fast and efficient loading
  • String search
    • Copying of strings
    • Copying of demangled strings
  • File hashing support
    • CRC16 and CRC32 with custom initial values and polynomials
    • MD4, MD5
    • SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512
  • Disassembler supporting many different architectures
    • ARM32 (ARM, Thumb, Cortex-M, AArch32)
    • ARM64
    • MIPS (MIPS32, MIPS64, MIPS32R6, Micro)
    • x86 (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit)
    • PowerPC (32-bit, 64-bit)
    • SPARC
    • IBM SystemZ
    • xCORE
    • M68K
    • TMS320C64X
    • M680X
    • Ethereum
  • Bookmarks
    • Region highlighting
    • Comments
  • Data Analyzer
    • File magic-based file parser and MIME type database
    • Byte distribution graph
    • Entropy graph
    • Highest and average entropy
    • Encrypted / Compressed file detection
  • Helpful tools
    • Itanium and MSVC demangler
    • ASCII table
    • Regex replacer
    • Mathematical expression evaluator (Calculator)
    • Hexadecimal Color picker
  • Built-in cheat sheet for pattern language and Math evaluator
  • Doesn’t burn out your retinas when used in late-night sessions

Screenshots

hexe
hexe2

Pattern Language

The custom C-like Pattern Language developed and used by ImHex is easy to read, understand and learn. A guide with all features of the language can be found in the wiki or a simpler version in ImHex under Help -> Pattern Language Cheat Sheet

Additional Files

For format patterns, includable libraries and magic files, check out the ImHex-Patterns repository. Feel free to PR your own files there as well!

Nightly builds

Nightlies are available via GitHub Actions here.

Compiling

You need a C++20 compatible compiler such as GCC 10.2.0 to compile ImHex. Moreover, the following dependencies are needed for compiling ImHex:

  • GLFW3
  • libmagic, libgnurx, libtre, libintl, libiconv
  • libcrypto
  • capstone
  • nlohmann json
  • Python3
  • freetype2
  • Brew (macOS only)

Windows and Linux

Find all-in-one dependency installation scripts for Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and/or MSYS2 in dist.

After all the dependencies are installed, run the following commands to build ImHex:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make -j

To create a standalone zipfile on Windows, get the Python standard library (e.g. from https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/master/Lib) and place the files and folders in lib/python3.8 next to your built executable. Don’t forget to also copy the libpython3.8.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll from your mingw setup next to the executable.

On both Windows and Linux:

  • Copy the files from python_libs in the lib folder next to your built executable.
  • Place your magic databases in the magic folder next to your built executable
  • Place your patterns in the pattern folder next to your built executable
  • Place your include pattern files in the include folder next to your built executable

macOS

To build ImHex on macOS, run the following commands:

brew bundle --no-lock --file dist/Brewfile
mkdir build
cd build
CC=$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/clang CXX=$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/clang++ PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib/pkgconfig":"$(brew --prefix)/lib/pkgconfig" cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make -j

Credits

  • Thanks a lot to ocornut for their amazing Dear ImGui which is used for building the entire interface
    • Thanks to orconut as well for their hex editor view used as base for this project.
    • Thanks to BalazsJako for their incredible ImGuiColorTextEdit used for the pattern language syntax highlighting
    • Thanks to AirGuanZ for their amazing imgui-filebrowser used for loading and saving files
  • Thanks to nlohmann for their json library used for project files
  • Thanks to aquynh for capstone which is the base of the disassembly window
Github Link
Automatic Enumeration Tool

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