The third alpha release of nHex-Ed offers several new features, bringing it close to what I had in mind for the first “real” release of this little hex editor.

The following items are new or improved:

• Completely rewritten menu routines, with shortcuts and direct-access keycodes that can be used without entering the menu itself
• Rewritten “forms” routines, with ins/del/home/end keys and “radio-button” style choice between hex/ascii or hex/decimal entries for searching and entering addresses
• Improved search routine, remembering the previous search string the way it was entered (hex or ascii)
• Improved “goto” routine, remembering preference for hex or decimal
• Added -j startup option to jump directly to a specific address in the file
• Recalculate number of columns and rows if the terminal window is resized
• Several bug fixes (thanks to all who gave feedback!), including a rare segfault and some odd behavior in Xfce Terminal

Here is a partial screenshot showing the new menu with the shortcuts and direct-access keycodes:

The new tarball is available for download from nHex-Ed’s homepage.

This second test version brings:

• A “find” function (still not the way I want it, but for now it’s working)
• “Goto” to jump directly to a specific position in the file
• “Save As” option
• Some small bugfixes
• several small cosmetic changes

I’m currently rewriting the menu functions. The idea is to create something very flexible that can be used both with the ncurses interface as with gtk (yes, that’s where it will go eventually).

A tarball can be downloaded from nhexed’s homepage.
If you want to browse the sources, you can check them out on my public github page. But remember that sources from git are constantly changing, so be extra careful when using intermediate versions.

Feel free to take a look, compile it using the normal configure / make / make install sequence and tell me what you think of it!

For now it only has the basic functions that the original Hex-Ed had, with the exception of the “Find” feature, as I’m still rewriting it (I was never too happy with the way it worked…).

It already has some new features as well, as multi-level undo (up to the last 1000 changes) and it can now edit files of up to 4GB in size.

This is what it looks like:

I wrote about my little Hex Editor before, but somehow this subject still comes back… It is still being downloaded several times a day (more than 2.000 downloads only this year!).

Evolution

Although I haven’t done any programming in Windows for years, and Hex-Ed has received it’s last update in 2004, I still receive requests once in a while for new features for Hex-Ed. I thought about simply transforming it in Free, Open Software, publishing the code on my site, but the code is a bit messy, since I never thought about publishing it when I originally wrote it. And the base for Hex-Ed was written decades ago…

Fresh start

So recently I started to re-write it from scratch, but using several parts of the original code (especially the “internals”, that haven’t changed for years), including comments where helpful. The difference is that this time I’ll write it as an open-source project, to be compiled with gcc. The idea is to create a portable project that can be built & run under Linux, Windows and maybe even other systems. I have lots of ideas for improvements, but too little time to realize them all.
For now I have a version in “alpha” state – here is a basic screenshot of the ncurses version:

I’ll post updates on the progress whenever I have some time

1. Hex-Ed – a small (~80k) Hex Editor for Windows
2. Sudoku.xls – an Excel macro to solve puzzles
3. bmp2xls.zip – a silly program to convert bitmaps to spreadsheets
4. bal_local – a script to balance to internet connections
5. slackware-1.01.tar.gz – the oldest Slackware version still around
6. sls-1.03_x_series.tar.gz – the X series for Slackware or SLS
7. Elevator.ldr – a Lego drawing of an elevator
8. leocad-* – a drawing program for Lego
9. Opleggertje – an Excel macro for a simple card game
10. hercules-* – the mainframe emulator

It is interesting to see that the top three files are old Windows projects from a couple of years ago.
Hex-Ed was last updated in the beginning of 2007, but has been downloaded over a thousand times since august… My Slackware packages only get in the tens or hundreds of downloads

Today I was ‘Googling’ and by coincidence found a page talking about some software I wrote several years ago. It’s a simple Hex-editor for Windows written in C, based on much older versions, dating back from the days of CP/M. If you have no idea what CP/M is, you’re probably a bit younger than I am

This version I found today on the internet dates from 2003 / 2004. I published it at the time for free download (I always believed in free software) on my website. I never promoted it too much, but some people managed to find it and at the time I received quite some feedback.

After finding that page, I did a Google search on this Hex Editor and found pages from all over the world mentioning my software Never had any idea my little program has been used in places like Poland, China, etc…

That’s the internet: no more distances and complete anonymity.