What’s an 0xED?
May 18th, 2007
Different applications open different files: Word opens Word docs; Excel opens spreadsheets; Adobe Reader opens .pdf files; text editors open text files. Each of these has its place, but each of them also imposes their respective world view on the files that they open. Formatting information, numeric precision, Postscript instructions–these all come between you and the actual data in those files. Sometimes you just really need to look at the unfiltered, raw data in a file. Sometimes you need a "hex editor".
Hex editors, short for "hexadecimal editors", are applications that allow you to edit files on a byte-by-byte basis. Open a file and you see exactly what’s there. If an errant end-of-file character somehow ends up in the middle of your file, you cannot get to the end of that file, unless you break out your hex editor, the Swiss Army Knife of software applications. Go in and tweak that character and you're good to go.
0xED is a Mac hex editor. It's a Universal Binary, so it will run on MacIntel and PPC machines. It requires OS X 10.3.9 or better.
So what is "0xED"? "0x" (zero-ecks) is an oft-used abbreviation for "hex", so 0xED is literally "hex editor".
