Top
Best
New

Posted by tobr 2 days ago

Your hex editor should color-code bytes(simonomi.dev)
406 points | 118 commentspage 5
a_t48 11 hours ago|
I've started doing this with hashes in a CLI I'm working on. For slow prints, it's somewhat helpful https://asciinema.org/a/aD38Pk88CZgSZqtq but for debug dumps with many many hashes it really helps readability and tracking hashes across lines.
7bit 9 hours ago||
> 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.

masklinn 9 hours ago||
> The only good syntax highlight to me is 00 and perhaps FF. But that's my opinion of course.

Would probably make the most sense to have various ranges you can enable depending on what you’re looking for (or to look for patterns) e.g. for single byte coloration I could see

- nul

- printable / non-printable ascii

- non-ascii

- UTF8 leading / continuation

- separators

- start/end pairs (both printable and non printable)

gblargg 9 hours ago||
It would be interesting to do a heat map coloring based on frequency of that value.
TheRealPomax 4 hours ago||
It'd be nicer if the hex coloring actually matched the "ascii" coloring as well. Orange on the left but green on the right does not help find things.
0xfalafel 5 hours ago||
[dead]
samzong_ 11 hours ago||
[dead]
ralferoo 9 hours ago|
I 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 down as far as the blue C0. Maybe if it was all uncoloured and blue just for that, I might have actually noticed it looking different earlier.

It's been a while since I used hexedit on Linux, but I think that highlighted search results in reverse colours, just like less does for text search. Personally, I'd prefer that to colours.

assimpleaspossi 9 hours ago|
Agree. This is what indentation and brackets, etc. are for. So much color makes it a clown car image to wade through.
teddyh 8 hours ago||
The old disparaging term was “angry fruit salad”: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.htm...>