byteview

a modern hex/binary file inspector for the terminal.

inspect any file byte-by-byte with color-coded output, entropy analysis, string extraction, and pattern search. designed for reverse engineers, CTF players, and anyone who needs to look at raw bytes.

install

pip install -e .

usage

byteview file.bin               # hex dump (first 256 bytes)
byteview file.bin -a            # dump entire file
byteview file.bin -n 512        # first 512 bytes
byteview file.bin -s 0x100      # start at offset 0x100
byteview file.bin -w 32         # 32 bytes per line

byteview file.bin -o            # octal dump
byteview file.bin -b            # binary dump

byteview file.bin -i            # file info + magic byte detection
byteview file.bin -e            # entropy analysis
byteview file.bin -S            # extract printable strings
byteview file.bin -f deadbeef   # search for hex pattern
byteview file.bin --freq        # byte frequency distribution

byteview file.bin --no-color    # disable ANSI colors

color coding

bytes are color-coded by classification:

class	range	color
null	0x00	gray
printable	0x20-0x7E	green
whitespace	09,0A,0D	cyan
control	0x01-0x1F	red
high	0x80-0xFF	yellow

entropy analysis

$ byteview encrypted.bin -e
shannon      7.9994 / 8.000
entropy      [████████████████████████████████████████]
chi-squared  241.37
verdict      maximum entropy — likely encrypted or compressed

magic byte detection

byteview identifies file types from magic bytes: PNG, JPEG, GIF, ZIP, ELF, PE, PDF, gzip, WAV, Java archives, Mach-O, WebAssembly, SQLite.

license

MIT