Many of us have opened a hex editor to analyze a file or to learn reverse engineering. One day I came across an interesting [article on color-coding bytes](https://simonomi.dev/blog/color-code-your-bytes/). Without much hesitation, I decided to write an article — not just a tutorial on highlighting bytes, but a deep dive into the inner workings of a minimal hex editor. We'll explore how bytes become a hex dump, what approaches to highlighting exist, and why this matters for analyzing binary data.