Viewing binary files in vim displays gibberish

Question

When I open up a binary file in Vim, it displays a bunch of gibberish. One would expect it to display a bunch of 1s and 0s. Why is this?

Answer 1

Excellent question.

Text editors don't open files and show binary. They typically read files with ASCII or Unicode encoding.

Here's some examples of how ASCII encoding works:

http://www.asciitable.com/

Basically the way it works is, it reads the first number of bytes, and then interprets that collection of bits as a certain character, which is what you're seeing on your screen.

However, if you want to show binary (or hex) in Vim, you can, by doing something like this:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Hex_dump