Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by shaicoleman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

shaicoleman

Tweak misses the following things I expect in a hex editor:

* No help screen to show the hotkeys

* Changes aren't highlighted

* Hotkeys are unintuitive unless you use Emacs (less than 5% of users [1])

* No undo/redo

* No search

* No option for decimal offsets/size

I've tried dozens of hex editors:

* hexedit [2] is the best option for Linux, despite it being web based.

* dhex [3] is probably the best option for the terminal, but not great.

* HxD [4] is great if you're on Windows

1. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...

2. https://hexed.it/

3. https://www.dettus.net/dhex/

4. https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

View on HN

* the manpage is pretty comprehensive (https://linux.die.net/man/1/tweak)

* no highlighting is a bummer.

* hotkeys are reasonable if you use readline(1)

* no undo, true.

* C-s, C-r are search forward and backwards, as expected.

* width and offset are configurable in .tweakrc, or pass -w and -o at launch.

> * the manpage is pretty comprehensive (https://linux.die.net/man/1/tweak)

I can't think of any ncurses app that doesn't have in-app help.

These are the steps I went through to figure out the hotkeys:

- press h, Shift+H, ?, Ctrl-H, Ctrl-H+Ctrl-H, F1, :help (nope)

- open new tab

- change directory to where I compiled tweak

- ./tweak --help (nothing there either)

- ls (figure out what the man filename is)

- man ./tweak.1 (shows the default hotkeys, but not easy to parse as a quick reference)

- ./tweak -D (success)

For comparison in top, h works, ? also works, and pressing Ctrl-H shows a helpful message "Unknown command - try 'h' for help"

> * hotkeys are reasonable if you use readline(1)

Readline is reasonable for a line editor, not for an ncurses app. Just as an example, in every other hex editor I've used, pressing Tab would switch between the hex/ascii panes.

> * C-s, C-r are search forward and backwards, as expected.

I missed that, but can't search by hex, which is another basic functionality

> can't search by hex, which is another basic functionality

As the manpage mentions in the “Searching” section, you can search for byte values by preceding them with backslashes.

Agreed entirely on your summation at the bottom. No good CLI hex editors exist. It's been like this for years, not sure why. dhex is indeed the "closest" to decent, but still lacks... a lot.

High-Inertia Random Idea #218,554,763:

A service people can publish extremely specific ideas to about how they want certain things - apps, systems, hardware, policies, anything - to work, and the best/most insightful ideas float to the top. Then, people who a) want to Start Again™ or b) vent off some steam in the general direction of a project they're already familiar with, can just look at this site for community-ranked suggestions of where the most demand is.

You could implement a rough version of this as a subreddit.

No good CLI hex editors exist.

HIEW has my preferred hex editor for over two decades.

I would not use a hex editor with no search function, yet "decimal offsets/size" is one of the last things I care about if I'm using a hex editor.

I think Okteta has all of the features you mentioned except change highlighting.

Yes, Okteta does everything except change highlighting, and is probably the best GUI option on Linux.

HxD is pretty good in windows but I have had a few minor issues with it. I’ve been trying to get an image of a floppy disk to a analyze but unfortunately loading it from HxD seems to cut some of the data off. I verified this by transferring some files from the original device via xmodem to a PC and noticed the end of the last file was cut off in the floppy disk image. I’ve tried a couple other hex editors with various permissions issues dumping a disk for some reason. Any idea for something that can dump this disk so I can analyze it in a hex editor?

Try WinImage on Windows, or dd on Linux

Reply on news.ycombinator.com