hexyl

name	hexyl
description	Use this skill when the user wants to inspect binary files, view hex dumps, examine file headers, debug compiled output, analyze binary data, or pipe raw bytes into a formatted hex viewer.

Hexyl Plugin

A command-line hex viewer by sharkdp (fd, bat author). Pretty-print binary files with colored output.

Commands

Self

• hexyl self version — Print version

Hex

• hexyl hex view — View hex dump (passthrough: hexyl <file> [-n bytes] [-s skip])

Passthrough

• hexyl _ _ — Passthrough for any hexyl command

Usage Examples

• "Show the hex dump of this binary file"
• "Inspect the first 64 bytes of this WASM file"
• "View the file header of this PNG image"
• "Show me the binary content of this executable"

Installation

cargo install hexyl

Examples

# Basic hex dump
hexyl file.bin

# Read from stdin
cat file.bin | hexyl

# First N bytes
hexyl -n 64 file.bin
hexyl -n 4KiB file.bin

# Skip N bytes
hexyl -s 1024 file.bin
hexyl -s 0x1000 file.bin

# Combined: read 256 bytes starting at offset 512
hexyl -n 256 -s 512 file.bin

# Custom block size
hexyl --block-size 1024 file.bin

Key Features

• Colored output: different colors for different byte types
• ASCII representation column
• Smart byte grouping (4-byte nibbles)
• Column headers with offsets
• Supports stdin piping
• Binary and decimal offset notation
• Length and skip filters
• Block-size formatting