The radare project began in February of 2006 to provide a free and simple command-line hexadecimal editor with support for 64-bit offsets. The intention was to use the tool to perform searches and help recover data from hard-disks.
Since then, the project has evolved to provide a complete framework for analyzing binaries while making use of basic *NIX concepts. Those concepts include the famous "everything is a file," "small programs that interact using stdin/stdout," and "keep it simple" paradigms.
It is mostly a single-person project. However, ideas and source code contributions are greatly appreciated.
The central focus of this project is the hexadecimal editor. Additionally, this project contains an assembler/disassembler, code/data analysis and graphing tools, scripting features, easy Unix integration, and more.