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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

#101

Post by pc86 »

watwut wrote: post #70
gortok wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sin…

Most color blind men are mildly color blind, plenty even go through their lives without noticing. Yours is on the much stronger side of the things.

A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#102

Post by pc86 »

tosti wrote: post #87
finaard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly. Why would you do that?

It's obviously a typo (or an excellently delivered joke) but I did get a chuckle out of the idea of someone going out of their way to ask color blind friends for feedback just to do the opposite out of spite for some reason.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#103

Post by r0yadar »

octagons wrote: post #75
cuechan wrote: post #23

For anyone who regularly has to look at/analyze binary files, i highly recommend ImHex [1]. Its a hex editor built with imgui and has a lot of built in tools. Imo the best feature is the data structure editor. You can write a data type definition similar to C and it overlays it on the hexdump and parses it in a structured way while you type. It also has a node based editor. 1: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

ImHex++. I also can’t help but shill for 010 Editor, a commercial alternative that one might describe as a little less opinionated.

Yeah 010 is my go to (much cleaner for me)

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#104

Post by basilgohar »

gortok wrote: post #39
finaard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sin…

Thank you both for sharing your lived experience as well as concrete examples for understanding. I, like I am sure many others, live a richer life knowing what others are going through and how I can make tiny adjustments, even if it's just awareness, to account for how others different from in one way or another go through life.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#105

Post by dhosek »

I found the coloring in most of the examples to be more distracting than helpful. I can see cases where it could be helpful (e.g., highlighting bytes in the 0x20–0x7E range for spotting ASCII strings, or a fancier one that can identify UTF-8 strings, or better still, invalid sequences in what might otherwise be UTF-8), but most of the cases here didn’t really help all that much for me.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#107

Post by dhash »

cuechan wrote: post #23

For anyone who regularly has to look at/analyze binary files, i highly recommend ImHex [1]. Its a hex editor built with imgui and has a lot of built in tools. Imo the best feature is the data structure editor. You can write a data type definition similar to C and it overlays it on the hexdump and parses it in a structured way while you type. It also has a node based editor. 1: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

ImHex is amazing! It’s actively maintained, sponsored by FUTO, and is very hackable (both without recompiling, as well as modifying the grammars for others to take advantage of)

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#108

Post by nickwanninger »

I added type-based color printing to my hexdump in my kernel [1] if anyone wants to have that code. It was instrumental in finding bugs quickly in wee hours of the night sometimes, especially if you have heap corruption. ---- [1] https://github.com/ChariotOS/chariot/blob/e046849c668458d25e...

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#110

Post by jcalvinowens »

If you just want to see patterns, and don't actually need to see the values, you can go a step further and simply visualize the data as a bitmap, e.g.

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$[256*256] count=1 | display -size 256x256 -depth 8 GRAY:-
You can do the same thing with audio, which makes different sorts of patterns obvious, e.g.

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$[256*256] count=1 | aplay -c 1
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