How to view, edit and search a binary file in your browser (hex, text and bit-sequence search)

2 minute read

Published:

🔢

ClearEvo hex viewer/editor screenshot

🌐

A step-by-step guide to the ClearEvo Hex Editor - a free online hex editor: open any file, edit bytes in place, and search by hex, text, numbers or bit sequences, all in your browser with nothing uploaded. (Background in the original post.)

View and edit

  1. Open https://www.clearevo.com/hex/ (any modern browser) and open your file - it’s processed entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded (Google Analytics for visit stats only).
  2. Click a byte and type hex digits to overwrite it. Arrow keys move around; modified bytes are highlighted.
  3. Save the edited copy back out. (Overwrite-only today - no insert/delete of bytes yet.)

Search four ways

  • Hex sequence - e.g. DE AD BE EF, separators optional.
  • Text - a plain string, encoded and searched as bytes.
  • Number - type a decimal (or 0x hex) value, pick little/big endian, and it’s searched octet-aligned. The type is previewed Rust-style (u8/u16/u32/u64, automatically i8/i16/… when negative) - auto-picks the smallest fit, or select one yourself.
  • Bit sequence at any bit offset - paste a pattern like 101100111 and it’s found even when it straddles octet boundaries, reported as byte offset + bit offset. This is the one I built it for: bit-packed telecom/GNSS payloads where fields don’t align to bytes.

Searches wrap around; Enter or C-s jumps to the next match. There’s also a goto-offset box (hex).

This tool is free software and open source: ykasidit/clearevo_online_tools - issues and pull requests welcome.

Full disclosure: this post - and any code or tool it describes - was co-authored with Claude (Anthropic’s AI, via Claude Code). I directed, guided and reviewed. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

Leave a Comment