Very fortunately, there are utilities that can open, display, and enable you to change characters or binary bytes inside any kind of file. These are called binary editors or hexadecimal editors, and the best of them in my experience (at least for the Linux world) is the Bless Hex Editor. It was designed to operate under graphical user interfaces such as Gnome, and it is very easy to figure out by exploring the menus.
Bless is not installed by default under Ubuntu. You can download it free of charge from its home page: http://home.gna.org/bless/
However, you can very easily install it from the Ubuntu Applications menu. Select Add/Remove and leave the view set to All (the default). Type Bless in the Search field, and the Bless Hex Editor should be the only item to appear. (Give it a few seconds to search; the item won’t appear instantaneously.) Check its check box to select it for installation, and then click Apply. Once installed, the Bless Hex Editor will be available in Applications → Programming, or you can create a desktop launcher for it if you prefer.
Bless Hex editor comes with some nice features mentioned below :
- Bless hex editor (hexadecimal editor) is a cross platform application available for major operating systems like Linux, Microsoft Windows, MacOS.
- Can open any number windows using Tab.
- You can quickly find for some content and replace it.
- We have advance level of copy and paste feature in Bless Hex editor (hexadecimal editor).
- You can use Bless best hex editor to edit large number of data files and also block devices.
- One of the best part of this application is you can get more features as per your need by installing required plugins.
- By default you can export data in .txt and .html format but for more other formats you can use plugins.
Follow the below steps to install Bless Hex editor (Hexadecimal Editor) in Ubuntu – A best Hex editor for Linux. Before we start the installation let’s update the packages and repositories of Ubuntu using below command.
geekdiary@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get update # Update Packages & Repositories [sudo] password for geekdiary: Hit:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease Hit:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease Hit:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease Hit:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports InRelease Reading package lists... Done
Now we are ready to install Bless Hex editor (hexadecimal editor). To install the package we don’t have to install any 3rd party PPA Repository as Bless best hex editor is a part of default repository of Ubuntu 16.04. So let’s install the package using below command.
geekdiary@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install bless # Install Bless hex editor Package Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: bluefish-data bluefish-plugins gnome-icon-theme libdbus-glib1.0-cil libdbus-glib2.0-cil libdbus1.0-cil libdbus2.0-cil libgconf2.0-cil libgdata2.1-cil libgkeyfile1.0-cil libgtk-sharp-beans-cil libgudev1.0-cil libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-data-tds4.0-cil libmono-sharpzip4.84-cil libmono-system-core4.0-cil libmono-system-data4.0-cil libmono-system-enterpriseservices4.0-cil libmono-system-numerics4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime-serialization4.0-cil libmono-system-servicemodel-internals0.0-cil libmono-system-transactions4.0-cil libmono-system-xml-linq4.0-cil libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil libnewtonsoft-json5.0-cil libnotify0.4-cil libqt4-designer libqt4-qt3support libtaglib2.1-cil libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-common libwnck-common libwnck22 libwxbase3.0-0v5 libwxgtk3.0-0v5 mplayer2 python-wxgtk3.0 python-wxversion Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them. The following additional packages will be installed: docbook-xml libglade2-0 libglade2.0-cil librarian0 rarian-compat sgml-data Suggested packages: docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-xsl docbook-defguide monodoc-gtk2.0-manual perlsgml w3-recs opensp libxml2-utils The following NEW packages will be installed: bless docbook-xml libglade2-0 libglade2.0-cil librarian0 rarian-compat sgml-data 0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 398 not upgraded. Need to get 833 kB of archives. After this operation, 5,595 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y ---> Enter "y" to continue the installation
As you can see above we have successfully installed the Bless Hext editor package. To confirm the same you can use the below command.
geekdiary@ubuntu:~$ sudo dpkg -l bless # Confirm the installed Package Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-====================================-=======================-=======================-============================================================================= ii bless 0.6.0-5 all A full featured hexadecimal editor
Now, to open the application, type the command bless on the shell prompt. Refer to the command below.
geekdiary@ubuntu:~$ bless # Open the Bless Hexadecimal editor Package
Package Version :
You can also open the Bless Hex editor application by searching your computer box. Refer to the snapshot below.