Binary Viewer is a free portable tool for viewing the contents of binary files, and/ or physical drives.

At its most basic, the program can be used as a hex editor (only without the editing - it's strictly a viewer only). Choose your file, it's displayed in the usual Hex/ ASCII views, and you can browse the contents as required.

But, this is no ordinary viewer. There are no stupid file size limits (it can handle up to 16TB). It understands and displays Alternate Data Streams along with the regular file content. And all this can be shown in many different ways: hex, octal, unsigned integer, binary, ASCII or Unicode text, and optionally LittleEndian or BigEndian.

The "Find" tool is even more impressive, optionally searching for ASCII, Unicode, BigEndian or UTF8 text, hex sequences or binary patterns. Oh, and there's also regular expression support, and a "Find in Files" which can search any folder tree you specify.

Visualiser and Histogram tools give a graphical view of your file, while a configurable Structures tool maps sections of the file to known file structures (a bitmap header, for example).

Then there's a Bookmarking system to help you keep track of important places within a file. A Properties pane which lists details you won't always find elsewhere (ReparsePoint or SparseFile attributes). A Base64 Encoder/ Decoder, and more.

If there's a tiny issue here, it's that the sheer volume of panes and tabs can seem a little overwhelming when you open your first file. But any panes you don't need can be closed in a click or two. If you only need a plain hex viewer then you can use the program just for that, and then add other features as and when required.