Sorry to ask, but what is he use case for a hex viewer like this? What are the kinds of projects you might be working on when you use something like this?
You come across an undescript binary. It might be a jpeg with an altered extension, malware or basically anything. You open it in a hex viewer and try to gather some info.
Your lab manager goes "hey, can you generate these proprietary binary files (currently made with a horrible gui) to control this robot programmatically".
Uh, vim doesn't open binary files very well, and the initial goal is to just display them to figure out how they work not to edit them.
Afterwards you will probably want to run experiments with a hex editor, but I found that xxd + vim was better for reading then doing so directly in a hex editor at the time. If I did it again I'd likely start with this because of the color.
This isn't very common, but I was trying to build a common CLI tool in the browser to use in an internal application at work. I compared output from my implementation with the CLI tool until I got to feature parity (and to clear up confusing things in the spec/source code).
For other things, I've used it for examining network packets (binary protocols), mystery files, and proprietary data formats. I've also used a hex editor to hack executables (most notably hacking in a dark theme into Unity3D).
One (of many) uses I used xxd for: viewing a byte stream that is supposed to be utf-8 text, but the non-ascii characters in the file are not displaying properly. Hex viewers will let you see exactly what bytes are present, without interpretation. As for the utf-8 stream, it turned out to have been double encoded into utf-8.
So i have been working on an embedded project lately where i had to export the framebuffer to an sd Card. I used a raw Format first (netppm) and had to use vim in hex Mode to validate the header. So this is really neat. I was looking for an padding option in the readme but i guess i ll have to install it later
