I put the tee in there to show the bits being passed between them - note how utterly incomprehensible it is compared to xxd: $ echo 'Hello, world!' | xxd | tee /dev/stderr | xxd -rĠ0000000: 4865 6c6c 6f2c 2077 6f72 6c64 210a Hello, world!.Edit Your Hex Code, Modify Binary Data and Files If you really just want to cut that useful information off, xxd has an option for hex mode ( -p), but not for binary mode. xxd does similar for its binary mode, just using bits instead of hex. The traditional way to display this is as done by xxd it shows you practically everything you need to understand the binary file you're editing: on the left, where you are in the file (offset) on the right, what it is, if text (common enough in binary files) and in the middle, the raw binary data (presented in hexadecimal). Hexadecimal is used because it's easier for humans (far shorter) but still has a direct correspondence to the bits each 'nibble' of hex (0-9a-f) represents exactly 4 bits. The normal way to edit binary data is in hexadecimal with a hex editor.

Ultimately, any way it's displayed on your monitor is an abstraction there is simply no way to directly perceive the hundreds of billions if not trillions of voltage changes per second that the electronics actually deal in. That's an electronics question, though, and surely not a useful answer. I suppose with a much slower computer (not the multi-GHz machines that are common today), you could attach a high-bandwidth oscilloscope and almost see/read it as the computer does.

The computer reads it as two different voltage levels somewhere, which you of course can't see. I would like to simply read the binary of a file as the computer reads it …

File binary editor