HexWalk - Hex Editor/Viewer/Analyzer

HexWalk is an Hex editor, viewer, analyzer.

Built on qhexedit2, Capstone and Qt, with a built-in signature scanner, HexDig, inspired by binwalk.

It is cross platform and has plenty of features:

• Advanced Find (can find patterns in binary files based on HEX,UTF8,UTF16 and regex)
• Binary signature scanner and extractor — pick HexDig (built-in, no setup) or Binwalk (external) from Options
• Entropy Analysis
• Byte Map
• Hash Calculator
• Bin/Dec/Hex Converter
• Hex file editing
• Diff file analysis
• Byte Patterns to parse headers
• Disassembler for x86,ARM and MIPS architectures

Screenshots

• Main page

• Byte Map

• Advanced Search

• Entropy Calculator

• Binary Analyzer

• Hash Calculator

• Diff Analysis

• Binary Patterns for header parsing

Usage

HexWalk release executables are self-contained, you can use as-is.

The binary analyzer can be backed by either of two engines, selectable in Options → Analyzer:

• HexDig (default) — built in, no external dependency. Uses the 7z tool when extracting archives (ZIP, 7Z, TAR, GZIP, …). On Linux install it with your package manager (sudo apt install 7zip, or p7zip-full on legacy systems). The Windows installer bundles it; the macOS build ships it inside the application bundle.
• Binwalk — invoked as an external command. Install it separately if you prefer it: sudo apt install binwalk on Linux, brew install binwalk on macOS, or from the upstream repository.

For more details about the usage go to the Wiki:

https://github.com/gcarmix/hexwalk/wiki

Windows

HexWalk on Windows is released in different flavours:

• as an installer
• as a portable zip file

The fastest way to install it is through winget:

winget install hexwalk

MacOS

On MacOS you can easily download the .dmg file available in the release page and drag the app in the Applications folder as usual

Debian

The project is now available on backports for Bookworm, just enable the backports repos by adding this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main

and then type in:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install hexwalk

Ubuntu

The project is also available on launchpad https://launchpad.net/hexwalk to install on Ubuntu you can simply do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:carmix/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt install hexwalk

Linux

For other Linux distributions there's the AppImage file available in the release page. Just download, give execution permissions and you are ready to go.

The AppImage needs libfuse2 (or libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04+) on the target machine to mount itself.

Build

HexWalk uses CMake and requires Qt 6 (Core, Gui, Widgets, Charts).

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j

Helper scripts at the repo root:

• linux_build.sh — one-shot Linux build
• build-appimage.sh — produce a self-contained HexWalk-*.AppImage (uses linuxdeploy + the Qt plugin; downloads them on first run)
• build-deb.sh — produce a Debian source / binary package using the overlay under deb-packaging/hexwalk-2.0.0/debian/

The hexdig CLI is also built as part of the project — see hexdig/README.md for standalone usage.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to these projects:

• Binwalk - https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk (inspiration for the embedded HexDig scanner)

• QHexEdit2 - https://github.com/Simsys/qhexedit2

• Qt

• Capstone - https://www.capstone-engine.org