How do I open a file in binary/plaintext format on Mac OS X?

Question

This is the thing bugging me. I'd like to see some of my files in binary or plaintext format, but I can't figure out how to do it for all files. I can open some image files in plaintext using Textedit, but that's all I can figure out. Anyone know anything?

Answer 1

Use "od -h filename | less" in your Terminal.app.

Answer 2

To read binary/text file:

xxd file.jpg 

Answer 3

I'd recommend BBEdit (used to be TextWrangler) as a good general purpose plain-text editor. If you have this in the Dock, you can drag any file on to it and the file will be opened as plain text.

Answer 4

You can use Emacs hexl-mode.

In the terminal, type 'emacs' and the name of the file you want to open. When emacs opens up the file, type option-x hexl-mode.

Answer 5

I use HexEdit for this sort of thing. It can open any file and give you its hex and plaintext representation.

Answer 6

The editor of my choice for these kinds of things is Smultron.

Answer 7

You can always drop into a Terminal shell session, and use cat or hexdump to view any file as a text or hexadecimal file.

TextEdit will also display plain text files (as will about any other text editor, as noted by others).

Answer 8

Open the file with TextEdit - the plain text editor on MacOS - I was surprised it worked after trying for many days, many ways from many sources