Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your hex editor should color-code bytes

simonomi.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 165 posts

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#141

Post by [deleted] »

finaard wrote: post #35
dspillett wrote: post #11

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 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.

[deleted]

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#143

Post by einpoklum »

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

Seems useful, and the UI is quite cute :-)

But - it's also kind of huge for a hex editor. Wouldn't it be overkill for most people?

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#145

Post by Crestwave »

masfuerte wrote: post #93
bwiggs wrote: post #63

DEFCON30, Mayhem CTF. We were given a file full of random bytes. The flag was in there somewhere. It was too random to be encrypted, there wasn't any structure. `file` didn't return anything, truly just a bag of bytes. I had decided to install `hexyl` as an alternative option to some of the other hex editors installed o my linux machine. All the bytes were colored grey. I scrolled the file and noticed a blip of yello…

I don't get it. If you were looking at random data, why did hexyl apply colour to only the brace, C, T and F?

The implication is that the random-looking data did not contain ASCII characters other than the parts of the flag

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#146

Post by Crestwave »

ksherlock wrote: post #100
Crestwave wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't strings(1) have worked for this?

By default, strings needs a run of 4+ (printable|ascii) characters. This sounds like it was 1 ascii character at a time in a sea of random data (with other alpha chars removed).

Ah, right. It would have to be `strings -n 1`, then.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#147

Post by skalidindi3 »

https://github.com/skalidindi3/cxxd

I wrote this a LONG while back. At the time, I was fresh out of college and my first job included a lot of reverse engineering communication protocols to make machines work together for automation purposes. I will personally testify to how useful it was to see visual patterns to aid in this. The single biggest benefit was seeing that one particular protocol switched endianness WITHIN a specific packet.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#148

Post by tptacek »

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

This is a pretty common feature, isn't it? Binary templates, I mean. Even Hex Fiend has it.

Re: Your hex editor should color-code bytes

#150

Post by dunham »

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…

There is an app for that, too: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/

It has a little window you can move over the screen to simulate a few varieties of color blindness.

Post reply on HN