xxdi.pl is a perl script that implements vim's 'xxd -i -u' mode so that packages do not have to use all of vim just to get this functionality.
https://github.com/jpoet/HauppaugeUSB is an example of a package that uses it in this manner.
xxdi.pl was written by Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org and patches can be sent to him, or pull requests can be submitted from the main repo for this project at:
https://github.com/gregkh/xxdi
xxdi.pl is released under the GPL, version 2 only.