Binary Preview

Binary Preview is a language server and a set of editor extensions that show useful information when hovering over numeric literals and binary file paths in source code.

Binary Preview hover demo

Features

C, C++, Rust, and Python source files
Decimal, hexadecimal (0x), and binary (0b) integer literals
Decimal floating-point and scientific notation
Binary file paths in quoted and unquoted source text
PE, ELF, Mach-O, Universal Mach-O, and archive summaries
File size and a hex dump of the first 64 bytes

Editor support

VS Code extension: installation, settings, automatic LSP downloads, and local development
Zed extension: installation, LSP integration, and the design background specific to Zed

Both extensions use the same binary-preview-lsp implementation and provide the same hover analysis.

Repository structure

binary-preview-lsp/: Rust language server and binary parsers
vscode-extension/: VS Code language client
zed-extension/: Zed language server extension
assets/: shared project assets

Supported platforms

Tested and supported platforms are:

Windows x86_64
macOS Apple Silicon

Development

Build and test the language server:

cargo test --manifest-path binary-preview-lsp/Cargo.toml
cargo build --release --manifest-path binary-preview-lsp/Cargo.toml

Editor-specific build and development instructions are available in each extension directory.

Known limitations

Numeric literal parsing supports a common subset of C-like syntax rather than each language's complete grammar.

Python octal, underscore-separated, complex, and arbitrary-precision integer literals are not fully supported.
Rust type suffixes and underscore-separated literals are not yet supported.
Unary signs are not included in numeric literal analysis.
String escape sequences are not decoded when resolving file paths.
Binary files are inspected through source-code hover information rather than a dedicated binary editor view.

License

MIT