When you're going to color-code bytes in a hex dump, I would expect each ASCII character in the right column to have the same color as the hex byte in the left column, making it easier to pair them. I wonder why that wasn't done here.
Your hex editor should color-code bytes
31–40 of 165 posts
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#32> Your hex editor should colour-code bytes so it is easier for users to distinguish patterns > Article is fully in lowercase, which makes it harder for readers to make out sentences and the flow of the article > mfw the irony
The text smashed up to the left border doesn't help either.
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#33I actually stopped reading after the intro because I fundamentally disagreed with its premise. The "find the C0" took me about 1/4 second with uncoloured. Looking at the coloured took my eyes about 3 seconds to recover from the colour overload, then I was scanning down and found the colours so distracting with the constant switching between orange, pink and yellows than it took me a total of about 5 seconds to scan d…
Agree. This is what indentation and brackets, etc. are for. So much color makes it a clown car image to wade through.
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#34I actually stopped reading after the intro because I fundamentally disagreed with its premise. The "find the C0" took me about 1/4 second with uncoloured. Looking at the coloured took my eyes about 3 seconds to recover from the colour overload, then I was scanning down and found the colours so distracting with the constant switching between orange, pink and yellows than it took me a total of about 5 seconds to scan d…
Agree. This is what indentation and brackets, etc. are for. So much color makes it a clown car image to wade through.
The old disparaging term was “angry fruit salad”: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.htm...>
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#35Everything 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 o…
I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. I have some, and regularly send them screenshots of what I'm working on to get feedback what they can see and what they can read/can't read.
They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#36I used to use wxHexEditor and that had a feature where I could select a section of the file and highlight it in a color. When I was working to decode a certain file format, I used that to color-code different sections of the file and it was super useful. Those color-codes were stored in a separate file so you could load them back in.
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#37That 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…
> Actually why do we even have rendering with [012345678ABCDEF], when a specific set of (colored/imaged?) glyphs would be able to make more obvious what’s on the table? Most of us have internalized the relationship between digits in [0-9] for a very long time. Adding 6 more glyphs after that is quite easy (and they're also somewhat well known in the world), and after a while you stop even thinking about the glyphs co…
I thought about a similar concept for fun - each hex digit was replaced by 4x4 pixel matrix, where amount of pixels roughly corresponded to the value. So dot for 0, two dots for 1, checkerboard for 8 etc.
Then byte was represented as 16x16 matrix where each 4x4 area had the lower digit pattern, and these were arranged in the shape of the higher digit.
But at the end of the day, it wasn't really more readable.
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#38What a bad way to illustrate your point by using such similar looking pastel colours
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#39Everything 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 o…
I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. I have some, and regularly send them screenshots of what I'm working on to get feedback what they can see and what they can read/can't read. They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.
8% of the male population has some form of colorblindness (for women it’s around 0.5%). I have deuteranomaly colorblindness. If you search for images on the internet related to that type of colorblindness you’ll find representations of how we see color and how we see the world.
It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person.
1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do.
https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour...
Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes
#40I wonder how hard it would be to color code repeating sequences