Teehee - a modal terminal hex editor

Inspired by Vim, Kakoune and Hiew.

Installation

Just run cargo install teehee! If you don't have rust, you can get it from rustup.rs. The application will be available as the executable teehee.

Motivation

Reverse engineers, software engineers and other IT people often need to work with binary files. Hex editors are usually the go-to tool for dealing with binary file formats when a more specialized tool isn't available. Many of the existing hex editors lack support for modal editing, which Vim/Kakoune/Emacs users will miss. Hiew supports it to an extent, but it's non-free software, and its keybinds are unintuitive. Teehee is designed to offer a native-feeling experience to Kakoune and Vim users, while also providing additional hex editing capabilities like coloured marks for regions of data and encryption/compression scripts.

Demo

Teehee supports multiple selections, efficient selection modifying commands and various data editing operations.

Design

Implemented keybinds

• hjkl for movement (press shift to extend selection instead) ^ < h j l > k v
• g[hjkl] for jumping (G[hjkl] to extend selection instead)
  • h: to line start
  • l: to line end
  • k: to file start
  • j: to file end
• ; to collapse selections to cursors
• <a-;> (alt and ;) to swap cursor and selection end
• <a-s> (alt and s) to split selection to multiple selections of size...
  • b: 1 byte
  • w: 2 bytes (Word)
  • d: 4 bytes (Dword)
  • q: 8 bytes (Qword)
  • o: 16 bytes (Oword)
  • n: delimited by null bytes
  • <count>: any number of the above
  • /: matching a text pattern (? for hex pattern)
• d to delete selected data from buffer
• i to enter insert mode at the beginning of selections (I to insert hex instead of ascii)
  • a instead of i to enter append mode instead
  • c instead of i to delete selection contents, then enter insert mode
  • <c-n> to insert a null byte in ascii mode
  • <c-o> to switch between ascii and hex inserting
• ( and ) to cycle main selection
• <space> to keep only main selection, <a-space> to keep all selections but main
• r<key> to replace a each selected character with the ASCII character given
  • R<digit><digit> instead of r to replace with a single hex character instead
  • r<c-n> to replace with null bytes
• y to yank/copy selections to register "
• p to paste register " contents from y/d/c
• s to collapse selections to those matching a text pattern (S for hex pattern)

Entering a pattern:

• <C-w> to insert a wildcard
• <C-o> to switch input mode (ascii <-> hex)
• <esc> to go back to normal mode
• <enter> to accept pattern
• arrow keys, <backspace> and <delete> also supported