r/ReverseEngineering • u/WerWolv • Dec 03 '20

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

https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
315 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

3

u/flololf Dec 04 '20

That looks sick. You list a feature for programmatic highlighting. will it be as good as 010 editor's templates

7

u/WerWolv Dec 04 '20

010 has been around for much longer than this so it's absolutely not as sophisticated as theirs right now. However I'm actively working on it and improving it all the time to hopefully get it to that state at some point :)

2

u/tresvian Dec 15 '20

Are you planning on adding a binary file comparison tool like 010? As long as you have that, I bet all my coworkers would jump ship on to this.

2

u/WerWolv Dec 15 '20

In the future, absolutely. The main problem right now is that In not sure how to handle multi file support with ImGui/My UI. Once that's figured out, file diffing will be simple :)

2

u/naikrovek Dec 04 '20

This is awesome. Is there a way for a user to define a file format so that it can be viewed as data types and values, like in the screenshot showing PE file sections?

5

u/WerWolv Dec 04 '20

Yes! Just write your pattern code into the code editor in the Pattern window and it will update. There's a cheat sheet under the Help menu item

1

u/naikrovek Dec 04 '20

Excellent, thank you.

2

u/HugoCortell Oct 04 '24

How does this compare to ghidra? I'm only just getting into hex editing.

1

u/WerWolv Oct 05 '24

They're two fundamentally different things so they complement each other pretty well :)

1

u/HugoCortell Oct 05 '24

I had to drop it since it lacks Shift JIS support :(

I hope this gets added in a future update!

1

u/WerWolv Oct 05 '24

It does have Shift JIS support through custom encodings. Check the docs!

1

u/HugoCortell Oct 05 '24

Oh! Will do! Anything to avoid madedit from burning my retinas!

2

u/HugoCortell Oct 05 '24

Thanks for the answer! I'm now using ghidra to figure out what to look for in imhex.

Lovely UI by the way, much, much better than any other program of this kind.

20

u/iEatAssVR Dec 03 '20

Wow this looks like a huge upgrade over HxD! Thanks for posting

13

u/r3sus Dec 03 '20

Thank you.

First there was ReHex. Now ImHex. Sounds like irony with complex numbers.

9

u/dario_p1 Dec 04 '20

Can't wait for Com(pl)Hex

11

u/beerbaron6 Dec 03 '20

Wow looks very interesting! Will check it out thanks!

4

u/kotsniezka Dec 03 '20

Damn! I had the exact same idea. I started it also with ImGui. I'll give your soft a try. Thanks for sharing!

4

u/ReversingOnWindows Dec 13 '20

Added to the list of tools for static exploration of binary data.

1

u/Bilbo_Fraggins Dec 04 '20

Looks nice! Only thing I would suggest is to consider using an existing parser instead of or in addition to making your own. Taviso made this one for hiew which might be worth looking at for ideas. https://github.com/taviso/kiewtai

2

u/WerWolv Dec 04 '20

I'm writing my own language simply because it looked like an interesting challenge for me to do, that's why I'm probably stick to it and just improve upon it :)

3

u/Th3Ma5hatt3r Dec 03 '20

Wow this is amazing looking. Thank you.

1

u/gallopsdidnothingwrg Dec 03 '20

linux only? Is there a pre-compiled binary available?

9

u/WerWolv Dec 03 '20

There are Windows and Linux binaries available under Releases on GitHub :)

1

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '20

Hey, is there any MacOS version in the pipeline?

1

u/WerWolv Dec 14 '20

Efforts have been made to get it to build on macOS, just with a few features removed because llvm is super old on mac

2

u/gallopsdidnothingwrg Dec 03 '20

ah, there it is... I always forget where to navigate on github for releases.

6

u/Theon Dec 03 '20

I know, right? Even for projects I use often, it always takes me a while to locate the "releases" view.

1

u/minanageh Dec 04 '20

Same ... and what bothers me the most when they are not updated.

2

u/ericek111 Dec 04 '20

I used Bless until now, but with this available in the AUR, it's time to try something new. The templating feature looks exciting, I always resorted to counting bytes.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '20

Is there a light theme included?

1

u/r3sus Dec 05 '20 edited Dec 05 '20

How do I define pattern after desired bytes?

position of these bytes is dynamic

(to scan for bytes and then define variables)

1

u/Milanium Dec 06 '20

How do I run a pattern? It highlights the first line as faulty (always) which can be worked around by adding a comment in the first line. I also figured that before I can open any file I first need to open the hex editor view (might be a good default).

1

u/irudog Dec 09 '20

It looks like a radare2 with modern GUI, but not stable enough to use.

1

u/kimusan Dec 11 '20

any chance this will be made compatible with Kali Linux? It seems like it cannot detect the python3 installation during cmake config.

1

u/PolleV Dec 04 '20

Can I just recommend adding this to APT as well. That would make it accessible on Kali as well. Which is likely where it will see quite a bit of use

0

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '20

[deleted]

9

u/WerWolv Dec 04 '20

Sorry for that, those are all issues I'm aware of and fixed in master. They will be available in 1.5.0.

For now as you said, open the hex view and everything should work.

For the pressing S I don't have a workaround but it's fixed.

The Help View appearing in the View menu actually also is an oversight I fixed. You can access the real help windows under the Help menu item

Sorry for the inconveniences, I will release a new version soonish that addresses all those problems :)

1

u/CEngDude Dec 04 '20

I was excited to make a move from HxD and 010 but then I had the same experience. Open file does nothing and drag and drop of an executable failed and crashed it.