I vaguely remember a reverse engineering tool in the mid-to-late 2000s that displayed a similar (albeit greyscale) visualisation of entropy within large binary files. Anyone know what tool that would have been?
I was surprised by the timing of this post, after recently shipping a similar tool quite similarly named (vizbin as opposed to binviz). A little more surprised to see that so many folks have also developed similar tooling.
I don't know the name of the tool that did entropy visualization you're remembering, but this was my cue to mention that vizbin does that using the colorizer of your choosing.
Another comment mentions using such a tool on source code; the binary strings example shows just that, with the source embedded in a tarball. Text is rendered as an 8x8 glyph font so you can immediately eyeball both.
Rendering known pure text as 8x8 bitmap fonts via the tool might be a bit ludicrous, but you can force a different byteclass and see only the colors and not the actual ASCII characters, which I think might be what they are getting atwanting to do. https://github.com/scottvr/vizbin/tree/main#profile-structur...
Another useful things falls out from combining these concepts, which is that you could run `vizbin` on an entire repo. The example from the README (which assumes binaries) is given:
# which files stand out? cluster by their region composition
vizbin profile corpus/\*.bin --json | \
jq -r '[(.regions|map(.kind)|unique|join("+")), .source] | @tsv'
The github repo has been linked a handful of times above, but you can also just install it from PyPi with `pip install vizbin`
