And here is number 4 of my ‘best of’ eclipse plugins: the Eclipse Hex Editor Plugin or EHEP. It is a great tool to inspect or change files in hex mode. Installation of the plugin is simple: Get it from the http://ehep.sourceforge.net/update site.

Once I have the plugin installed, it offers an additional Hex Editor. I use the context menu Open With on a file, and it shows up in the Editor Selection:

Hex Editor Selection

The view allows to inspect and to change any files. So this is not limited to binary files. Usually eclipse is doing a great job preventing strange characters in source files. But for strange preprocessor compiler errors, it is valuable to check the hex content of a source file. That way I can exactly see that is in my source file:

Source File in Hex Mode

The view comes with an ASCII column on the right hand side. The status information at the bottom of the view provides additional details, including hexadecimal, decimal and binary values.

Happy Hexing 🙂

Ranking:

• Rank #1: Eclox
• Rank #2: AnyEdit Tools
• Rank #3: System and Desktop Search
• Rank #4: EHEP
• Rank #5: WickedShell