But the point is that binary formats shouldn't require looking at hex data just to make sense of them. Especially not nowadays. Once you're stuck parsing binary data by hand (which is tedious), you've lost the amazing benefit that text formats gave us. And editing binary formats is even worse.

That's why I split it into compatible text and binary formats. You transmit/store in binary, and read/edit in text, and the computer deals with the conversion automatically.

I think this is the direction things are heading. Currently, I use yaml for tons of configs and the like because it's super easy to modify. I use jq to process because jq is the bee's knees. There is a yq out there which can read most config formats, but it doesn't support the full jq syntax, so instead I pipe everything through `yq read -j -` to convert to json and then `| jq 'query'`. works a treat.

I can see with a few more small parts an application which persists as bson, streams / tempfile / and/or mmaps to yaml/hcl/whatever you like, opens that in your editor of choice, and translates back to bson.