Things I've used HexEdit for: Debugging: Examine other programs' binary output for errors (AIFF, MIDI, etc.) Spelunking: Examine/Edit the contents of a MIDI file. Examine binary files received from the Internet to see what format they are in (MacBinary, etc.) Reverse Engineering: Figure out how Kanji is encoded in a text file. Compare MS-Word format to RTF format. Examine the data fork of MS-Word Application (Owner Name is stored there in easily decrypted format) .