The figure below shows khexedit in a fairly default setup. As can be seen the editor area is divided into three components. The name of the area below the editor area and above the status bar is called the Conversion Field. This area displays, using various representation, the data value at the cursor position.
The offset area is placed in leftmost area of the editor. The offset values can be displayed as hexadecimal or decimal numbers. This area can be hidden if required.
The primary view is placed a the center of the editor. It can display data using hexadecimal, octal, binary or text representations. This area can never be hidden.
The secondary view or Text field is placed in the rightmost area of the editor. It can only display a text representation of the data.This area can be hidden if required.
The Conversion area shows the data value at the cursor position using a number of representations. The Show little endian decoding toggles the displayed data between big and little endian format. Little endian format is used on Intel CPU based computers.
The primary view can display data using one out of four available mode: Hexadecimal, Octal, Binary and Text Only. If the latter is selected the secondary view is automatically hidden.
The secondary view will always display a "Text only" replica of what is displayed in the primary view. This field can be hidden if selected from the View menu ("Show text field"). Since not every character code can be displayed as a printable character, the text view takes care of transforming the code into a symbol that can be displayed. The non-printable character codes are shown as a red dot in the editor image). The character code can its color can be selected in the Customize dialog box.