The Hex and text display is very good for displaying small record sizes but I often work with very large record sizes of a thousand bytes or more. One of the issues with the Hex and text display is that on these very large records you must scroll back-and-forth to view both the Hex and Text contents of a file. I often need to see both in the same view without having to scroll right and left and losing sight of where I was positioned within the file. I want to minimize the scrolling effort.
On the mainframe, I frequently use an ISPF editor that has similar capabilities. ISPF provides an option to view data in a "Stacked Hexadecimal" format that minimizes the need to scroll back and forth. I'd like to see HxD provide a similar feature for viewing files on a PC.
For instance, a file that contains the text:
41 20 54 6F 70 20 53 65 63 72 65 74 20 73 65 63 72 65 74 21 0D 0A A Top Secret secret!..
could be displayed (in Stacked Hexadecimal) as:
A Top Secret secret!..
4256725667672766767200
104F0035325403532541DA