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Comment by as-j | Hacker News Reader

The title seems pretty unkind to the project and I almost skipped it. “Bleh bleh yet another hex editor”.

But this has some nice features! For example, it can parse the executables, and show structures:

Disassembler supporting many different architectures ARM32 (ARM, Thumb, Cortex-M, aarch32) ARM64 MIPS (MIPS32, MIPS64, MIPS32R6, Micro) x86 (16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit)

Just to start, along with a ton of other file parsing, etc.

This looks pretty cool. Compiling it needs a C++20 compiler and no small list of dependencies...but it’s cool.

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Submitted title ("ImHex – A Hex Editor for people that value their eye sight") seems distracting and baity, so I've shortened it for now. If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

From their "About" section & README:

> A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people that value their eye sight when working at 3 AM.

Or their announcement page (https://werwolv.net/projects):

> A Hex editor with data pattern support and many features useful for Reverse Engineers

Maybe "ImHex - A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers" would be a better title?

This looks a much better title and match.

dang, any reason this can't be used?

I saw that, but could not find anything that's especially for reverse engineers.

The union of "reverse engineers" and "programmers" is just "programmers", and that basically means "a hex editor for people who use hex editors". No?

The union of "humans" and "animals" is just "animals". Does that make a "home for humans and animals" basically the same thing as a "home for animals"?

You should know better than to draw that equivalence, dang.

A home for humans has useful things for humans even if it also supports animals. So it’s still a home for humans.

What animals consider a home varies a lot. What programmers consider a hex editor, not so much.

If someone wants to point out what about this hex editor makes it more suitable for reverse engineers than the median text editor, I'll happily edit the title. The point is there needs to be something.

Not all "reverse engineers" are programmers. When I was younger, I liked hacking game saves, it isn't programming, you don't write programs, you don't even touch machine code, only data.

There is a strong overlap, but it is still a different set of skills and different tools (ex: hex editor vs IDE)

Yeah, the "for people that value their eye sight when working at 3 AM" got to me. I knew it had to mean that dark mode was a big feature here.

I don't know if this editor offers a light mode. I hope it does. I love good hex editors, and this one looks very interesting. But light mode is a necessity for me because of my vision.

I have no quarrel with anyone who only wants to implement dark modes, it just means I won't be able to use their products.

If it is a really good product you want to use anyway, there are programs that can invert the screen for you so you can use them. And the gamma settings in some display drivers can be set to invert too. Not so handy if it's an art program though...

It has constant-dark-mode tag, so can be called "constant dark mode hex editor". The eyesight part is simply misleading, dark mode is the last thing I would associate with that.

> and no small list of dependencies...

And that is why AppImage (as dev of ReHex did[0]) is much better way to provide binary for Linux, than ZIPed static linked binary package.

Just trying to execute binary from release asset `ImHex_1.5.0_Linux.zip`[0] under Debian 10:

    $ ./ImHex
    ./ImHex: error while loading shared libraries: libglfw.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

UPD: And just after install one dependency, there is another one

    $ ./ImHex
    ./ImHex: error while loading shared libraries: libcapstone.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[0] https://buildkite.com/solemnwarning/rehex/builds

[1] https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex/releases

> Compiling it needs a C++20 compiler

There have been discussions here about modern C++ example code. Lots of projects that use C++11, C++14 and a few C++17 codebases are suggested, but I've not seen a recommendation for a C++20 codebase to study - this might be one.

I love how their landing page includes a couple screenshots that show off some of these distinguishing features at a glance.

In the screenshot, there is one for "data information" - in that, what does the byte distribution and entropy chart help in understanding?

Not sure about byte distribution, but the entropy chart is going to be finding encryption keys.

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