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Your hex editor should color-code bytes

simonomi.dev

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Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#11

Post by dspillett »

Everything should try do some basic syntax highlighting IMO. Not too much, or it just becomes a sea of formatting that doesn't help at all. It is surprising how much difference just a little splash of colour can make if it isn't overdone. If possible, always include configuration options for the user though, so those with colour-blindness issues can tweak things to their needs, those who are just fussy can make the output fit with their finely adjusted system-wide colour schemes¹, and even better, where you can, allow bold/italic/other as well as colours so that those who barely see colour at all can play too.

Of course none of this helps those using screen-readers and other tech, so make sure that all your fancy colouring & such is additive so if it is all “lost” no meaning is absolutely lost with it.

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[1] Some people can be very vocal about this, more so than if highlighting isn't possible at all. If you give any output formatting they'll expect you to match, or be able to be made to match, their preferred style.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#13

Post by pratyahava »

xyx0826 wrote: post #10

If you analyze binary files often, I highly recommend binvis - http://binvis.io/ . It creates a colored minimap for files it loads and has two available arrangements. Pixel color is based on range of bytes, eg ASCII/null bytes/FF bytes. Besides, it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser. The minimap is extremely powerful for identifying interesting areas and patterns in unknown data.

> it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser

excuse me? "basic" and "runs in your browser" together sound very contradictory to me. while doing things i actually feel (yes, emotionally) much better when there is no browser open on my machine, but only text editors, vcs gui and file managers, and terminals of course. and sometimes i reject an idea to start a browser just thinking how much ram it will take (ha, what a progress we have done - one github issue tab, with text only and no images, takes 180mb of ram).

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#14

Post by GuB-42 »

psychoslave wrote: post #7

That said, even colored these dumps still feels unappealing to me — so yes this is admittedly subjective gut jumping in the conversation. I get that occult form can also be an attractive force. The post put on the table an interesting point about how to improve the presentation layer to fit what’s human cognition is good at spotting (in general, or at least for the expected audience with some training). And it does s…

I can't think of anything better than a hex dump for representing raw binary data. I don't mean that there are no others, equally good representations, but hex dumps win because of familiarity.

Of course, if you know about the format, there are better ways, but it goes beyond the scope of a hex editor, though the most advanced ones support things like template files and can display structured data, disassembly, etc...

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#15

Post by franga2000 »

pratyahava wrote: post #13
xyx0826 wrote: post #10

If you analyze binary files often, I highly recommend binvis - http://binvis.io/ . It creates a colored minimap for files it loads and has two available arrangements. Pixel color is based on range of bytes, eg ASCII/null bytes/FF bytes. Besides, it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser. The minimap is extremely powerful for identifying interesting areas and patterns in unknown data.

> it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser excuse me? "basic" and "runs in your browser" together sound very contradictory to me. while doing things i actually feel (yes, emotionally) much better when there is no browser open on my machine, but only text editors, vcs gui and file managers, and terminals of course. and sometimes i reject an idea to start a browser just thinking how much ram it will tak…

It's basic bause it does like two things. It's not advanced or complex. HN is also a basic forum, even though it runs in a browser.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#16

Post by duckmysick »

Archelaos wrote: post #9

This article made me think how I could use similar techinques to colour code the data in database tables. Has anyone here tried that and has some recommendations where to start, etc.?

DataGrip (and Pycharm by extension) lets you apply heatmap colors to dataframes and database tables: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/datagrip/tables-view-data.htm...

Another option would be to load data in pandas and display it in a Jupyter notebook with style.background_gradient()

Polars delegate styling to Great Tables, but it's also doable there: https://posit-dev.github.io/great-tables/get-started/coloriz...

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#17

Post by greatgib »

To me the random colors at each byte is messing up with my brain making it hard to fast identify C0 or any other value that I could more easily identify in all black.

But color would be nice more based on the bytes logic.

Eventually the 00 in a shaded grey instead of black, and in best case scenario by logic unit based on your protocol. And worst case scenario by groups of words or so.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#18

Post by 7bit »

> it’s much easier to pick out the unique byte when it’s a different color! human brains are really good at spotting visual patterns—given the right format

Don't really see the advantage. Unique bytes have no unique meaning across data types.

The only good syntax highlight to me is 00 and perhaps FF. But that's my opinion of course.

Anything else that has no direct relation to what you're looking at is meaningless.

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