When comparing iBored vs Hex Fiend, the Slant community recommends Hex Fiend for most people. In the question“What are the best hex editors for Mac?” Hex Fiend is ranked 3rd while iBored is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Hex Fiend is:
Hex Fiend does not keep your files in memory. You won’t dread launching or working with Hex Fiend even on low-RAM machines.
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Pros
Pro Free
iBored doesn't cost anything.
Pro Supports HFS, FAT, APFS and more disk structures
Uses an extensible templates system to view structures of common disk and volume formats.
Pro Disk editor
iBored is one of the few disk editors on the Mac.
Pro Remote operation
Can be used to remotely assist in viewing and repairing disks over the internet: iBored has to be started on both computers, and then one can connect to the other and view and modify its data (after getting permissions from the target side).
Pro Also available for Windows and Linux
Pro Small memory footprint
Hex Fiend does not keep your files in memory. You won’t dread launching or working with Hex Fiend even on low-RAM machines.
Pro Works with huge files
Hex Fiend can handle as big a file as you’re able to create. It’s been tested on files as large as 118 GB.
Pro Binary compare / diff
Hex Fiend can show the differences between files, taking into account insertions or deletions.
Pro Fast & efficient saving
Hex Fiend knows not to waste time overwriting the parts of your files that haven’t changed, and never needs temporary disk space.
Pro Insert, delete, rearrange
Hex Fiend does not limit you to in-place changes like some hex editors.
Pro Fast
Open a huge file, scroll around, copy and paste, all instantly. Find what you’re looking for with fast searching.
Pro Free and open source
Hex Fiend is licensed under a permissive BSD-style license.
Pro Data Inspector
Interpret data as integer or floating point, signed or unsigned, big or little endian...
Pro Embeddable
It’s really easy to incorporate Hex Fiend’s hex or data views into your app. Its permissive BSD-style license won’t burden you.
Cons
Con Files can't be saved with a .dat extension
Trying to save files with .dat extension gives the following error:
You cannot save this document with extension “.dat” at the end of the name. The required extension is “.(null)”.