ImHex

A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.

/ˈɪmhɛks/

Supporting

If you like my work, please consider supporting me on GitHub Sponsors, Patreon or PayPal. Thanks a lot!

Screenshots

Features

Pattern Language

The Pattern Language is the completely custom programming language developed for ImHex.
It allows you to define structures and data types in a C-like syntax and then use them to parse and highlight a file\’s content.

• Source Code: Link
• Documentation: Link

Database

For format patterns, libraries, magic and constant files, check out the ImHex-Patterns repository.

Feel free to PR your own files there as well!

Requirements

To use ImHex, the following minimal system requirements need to be met.

Important

ImHex requires a GPU with OpenGL 3.0 support in general.
There are releases available (with the -NoGPU suffix) that are software rendered and don\’t require a GPU, however these can be a lot slower than the GPU accelerated versions.

If possible at all, make ImHex use the dedicated GPU on your system instead of the integrated one.
ImHex will usually run fine with integrated GPUs as well but certain Intel HD GPU drivers on Windows are known to cause graphical artifacts.

• OS:
  • Windows: Windows 7 or higher (Windows 10/11 recommended)
  • macOS: macOS 13 (Ventura) or higher,
    • Lower versions should still work too, but you\’ll need to compile ImHex yourself. The release binaries will NOT work.
    • The macOS build is not signed and will require you to manually allow them in the Security & Privacy settings.
  • Linux: \”Modern\” Linux. The following distributions have official releases available. Other distros are supported through the AppImage and Flatpak releases.
    • Ubuntu and Debian
    • Fedora
    • RHEL/AlmaLinux
    • Arch Linux
    • Basically any other distro will work as well when compiling ImHex from sources.
• CPU: Officially supported are x86_64 and ARM64, though any Little Endian 64 bit CPU should work.
• GPU: OpenGL 3.0 or higher
  • Integrated Intel HD iGPUs are supported, however certain drivers are known to cause various graphical artifacts, especially on Windows. Use at your own risk.
  • In case you don\’t have a GPU available, there are software rendered releases available for Windows and macOS
• RAM: ~150MiB, more is required for more complex analysis
• Storage: 150MiB

Installing

Information on how to install ImHex can be found in the Install guide

Compiling

To compile ImHex on any platform, GCC (or Clang) is required with a version that supports C++23 or higher.
Windows and Linux releases are being built using latest available GCC.
MacOS releases are being built using latest available LLVM Clang.

Important to note is, the MSVC and AppleClang compilers are both NOT supported since they\’re both generally severely outdated and lack features GCC and LLVM Clang have.

Note

Many dependencies are bundled into the repository using submodules so make sure to clone it using the --recurse-submodules option.
All dependencies that aren\’t bundled, can be installed using the dependency installer scripts found in the /dist folder.

For more information, check out the Compiling guide.

Contributing

See Contributing

Plugin development

To develop plugins for ImHex, use the following template project to get started. You then have access to the entirety of libimhex as well as the ImHex API and the Content Registry to interact with ImHex or to add new content.

• ImHex Plugin Template

Credits

Contributors

• iTrooz for getting ImHex onto the Web as well as hundreds of contributions in every part of the project
• jumanji144 for huge contributions to the Pattern Language and ImHex\’s infrastructure
• Mary for her immense help porting ImHex to MacOS and help during development
• Roblabla for adding MSI Installer support to ImHex
• Mailaender for getting ImHex onto Flathub
• Everybody else who has reported issues on Discord or GitHub that I had great conversations with 🙂

Dependencies

• Thanks a lot to ocornut for their amazing Dear ImGui which is used for building the entire interface
  • Thanks to epezent for ImPlot used to plot data in various places
  • Thanks to Nelarius for ImNodes used as base for the data processor
  • Thanks to BalazsJako for ImGuiColorTextEdit used for the pattern language syntax highlighting
• Thanks to nlohmann for their json library used for configuration files
• Thanks to vitaut for their libfmt library which makes formatting and logging so much better
• Thanks to btzy for nativefiledialog-extended and their great support, used for handling file dialogs on all platforms
• Thanks to danyspin97 for xdgpp used to handle folder paths on Linux
• Thanks to aquynh for capstone which is the base of the disassembly window
• Thanks to rxi for microtar used for extracting downloaded store assets
• Thanks to VirusTotal for Yara used by the Yara plugin
• Thanks to Martinsos for edlib used for sequence searching in the diffing view
• Thanks to ron4fun for HashLibPlus which implements every hashing algorithm under the sun
• Thanks to mackron for miniaudio used to play audio files
• Thanks to all other groups and organizations whose libraries are used in ImHex

License

The biggest part of ImHex is under the GPLv2-only license.
Notable exceptions to this are the following parts which are under the LGPLv2.1 license:

• /lib/libimhex: The library that allows Plugins to interact with ImHex.
• /plugins/ui: The UI plugin library that contains some common UI elements that can be used by other plugins

The reason for this is to allow for proprietary plugins to be developed for ImHex.