Binpretty is a small tool to view the content of mixed binary/plaintext files.
binpretty showing a tar archive of this repository
It turns out a lot of binary formats are a mix of plaintext and binary; the binary means regular text editors aren't great at viewing them, but reading the plaintext in the small ascii representation on the right hand side of hex viewers isn't very nice either.
binpretty [file]...
You may want to pipe the output to less -R.
Just git clone this repo and run make && sudo make install. There are no
dependencies other than regular stdlib/posix stuff.