Summary:

Binary editor that displays binary as binary, rather than hexadecimal. Create, open, edit, and save binary files. Mainly for educational use to show that text files are binary files like any other information on computers, just interpreted as text by text editors. Also comes with example .txt, .exe, .bmp and .wav files (see caveats when opening the examples).

Typical use cases:

• write a few letters and/or numbers in Notepad or Nano, save the file, open up in Simple Binary Editor to see ASCII bits;
• write a few letters and/or numbers in Notepad or Nano, save the file, open up in Simple Binary Editor to see ASCII bits. Adjust the bits and save the file with a .txt suffix, and open it in Notepad or Nano to see whether it still displays properly;
• using an ACSII table to write a new chunk of text. Save the file with a .txt suffix, and open it in Notepad or Nano;
• find out something about the structure of the example files (for example that .wav files start with the ASCII text “RIFF”) and try to identify the information within them; what happens when you save them and open them with text editors?

Background and details:

I struggled to find a simple binary editor that could be used in teaching about files, and the difference, such as it is, between text files and other files. The distinction between text and binary files in APIs is helpful, but generally confuses beginners, who imagine that text files aren’t binary (rather than text editors just interpreting the binary files making up text files differently).

Most editors seem to have overly complicated insertion options for adding to files, and only display binary as hexadecimal or decimal integer values. So, here’s a simple binary editor that allows editing of the ones and zeros directly. It’s only at Version 0.1 (alpha testing): it should work ok (see caveats in examples), but I would advise not using it to copy over vital binary files or develop executables. Students should be warned not to copy over files or generate executables. It comes with a set of file type examples that can be accessed through the menus (.txt; .exe; .bmp; .wav). It also comes with a .bat file for running the Python on Windows and a shell file for Linux etc. You’ll need Python installed and in your PATH (Windows instructions; should be pre-installed on Linux).