8 ms·

I admit, my first thought on seeing the title was "What's wrong with xxd?" This is nice! I like the colorization a lot -- it's like with source code, you don't

by Twisol 8y ago

I admit, my first thought on seeing the title was "What's wrong with xxd?" This is nice! I like the colorization a lot -- it's like with source code, you don't realize how much you rely on the colors until you get a new computer and need to download syntax definitions for your editor again. Only feature I really think is missing is line numbers. Nicely done!

vectorEQ 8y ago
haha, had exactly the same thoughts. the colours really makes it much much easier on the eyes to recognise things. well done!
- joshenders 8y ago
  Same thought except, I wonder why this isn’t a patch to xxd?
  - Sean1708 8y ago
    I'm struggling to even find the canonical source code for xxd, let alone a way to provide a patch. You could probably email the address in the man page, but that's from 1997 so I wouldn't be too optimistic about getting a response. And even then it's quite likely that the original author considers xxd finished and would be reluctant to accept patches for it anyway. On top of all that the hard part of this work (cross-platform terminal colours) had already been done for the author, so the implementation was probably far easier than adding colour output to xxd would have been.
    - msla 8y ago
      Cross-platform terminal coloring was solved in the 1980s with termcap and then terminfo, for every terminal that's even come close to seeing mainstream use and which had colors in the first place. The libraries are part of the ncurses library and are shipped with every OS this stuff would build on to begin with. This also solves the problem of moving the cursor and drawing a screen in general.
      - Sean1708 8y ago
        Aren't termcap and terminfo linux (or maybe unix) only?
        feanaro 8y ago
        termcap is supported on FreeBSD, at the least.
        msla 8y ago
        Both of them long predate Linux. They're definitely Unix-flavored, but so's the Berkeley sockets library, and that's available everywhere, too. Ultimately, they're a library which is packaged with a database, and nothing about them is very system-specific except the terminal information in the database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo
        ksherlock 8y ago
        termcap was written by Bill Joy in 1978. terminfo dates back to 1982.
      - simplicio 8y ago
        Eh, A lot of modern terminal emulators don't seem to bother providing termcap/info entries, or setting their own $TERM variables. In reality, most code just fires off ANSI sequences and hopes for the best. Looking quickly at the source for Hexyl, I think that's what the ansi_term library it uses does. If anything, I've found doing this works better then trying to muck around with ncurses, which often gets actively mislead by incorrect terminfo entries.
        msla 8y ago
        ncurses wins once you use terminals beyond xterm.
      - ksherlock 8y ago
        termcap/terminfo styling is limited to features like underline, bold and reverse. No coloring, per se.
    - kazinator 8y ago
      xxd is distributed with Vim. I've never thought of xxd as being anything but a "Vim thing". That it had its own history (1990-1998) before being pulled into Vim is a TIL for me. Here you go: https://github.com/vim/vim/tree/master/src/xxd https://github.com/vim/vim/tree/master/src/xxd There might still be other versions of this out there, but I suspect most OS distros pick up xxd by way of packaging Vim. So if you work on some other xxd, you're probably in a dead fork. The man page is also from Vim: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/doc/xxd.1 https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/doc/xxd.1 My first patch to xxd, if I were to work on it, would be to fix the man page to indicate clearly that it's the xxd bundled with Vim.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - elteto 8y ago
    Because the author wanted to do his own, personal thing? I get the idea behind your question, but it irks me a bit since it implies a sort of responsibility to contribute to an existing piece of software. This is a net positive of course, but the beauty of open source is the freedom to work on the things you want to work on.
- kps 8y ago
  It's illegible in my terminal. Not a fan of the trend to hardcoded unicorn vomit.
cygned 8y ago
I have to admit, my first question in mind was how to disable colors because I do not use syntax highlighting at all.
- vectorEQ 8y ago
  but if you want to disable colours in this why not use hexdump or xxd :D . it's like the only feature it adds to standard hexdump tools
- sifoobar 8y ago
  Me neither. I did use it religiously for a long, long time; then tried without for a week and never went back. It's not like telling the difference between string literals and keywords was ever a major issue for me. I guess it could help short term when learning a new language, but I'm pretty sure it slows down overall progress.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    How does it slow down progress?
    - dublo7 8y ago
      For me it doesn't. It's a quick way to see that I made a typo when a keyword doesn't turn the right color, or that I closed a strong with the wrong quote Mark.
    - sifoobar 8y ago
      I find it's a bit like navigating using GPS, once I get there I still have no clue because I was mostly acting on cues. Slow compiles have the same effect for me, I get pushed out of flow and into reactive mode. The only way to write good code is to be proactive, and any features that interfere with that process are worse than whatever "problems" they "solve".
- userbinator 8y ago
  I'm also not a fan of the colouring, especially in this application, because when you're looking at a hexdump chances are you don't care about ASCII or whitespace --- and it's not as if you couldn't tell whether something is in the ASCII range, given the character representation in the right column anyway. The border lines don't help much either and seem more like decoration; addresses to the left and an indexing header on the top, like the traditional "canonical" hexdump format, would be far more useful.
hwj 8y ago
What are line numbers in context of a binary?
- twtw 8y ago
  Addresses.
  - archgoon 8y ago
    File offsets; not addresses :) I assume the tool isn't reading ELF format files and working out the memory address.
- Twisol 8y ago
  Right, I was being a bit loose there. I meant something like how `xxd` displays the number of bytes up to the current output row. Just something to give context of where you are in the file. 00006980: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
- msravi 8y ago
  You can quickly find position of byte number X using: line number = floor(X/(bytes/line)) + 1 column offset = X % (bytes/line) + 1 Or it could just print byte numbers instead of line numbers.
kbd 8y ago
> I admit, my first thought on seeing the title was "What's wrong with xxd?" My first thought too. Then I looked and saw it was nice, and then I noticed it's by sharkdp. He really has a knack for improving on things you thought were fine (fd and bat being other examples).
avidal 8y ago
Looks like the screenshots on Github are outdated. I just ran it locally and it does print out offsets in a new left-most column. edit: Added in this commit: https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl/commit/91a119f4537f746045c81e0bdc699e3b95fe7148 https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl/commit/91a119f4537f746045c8...
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Liked that though the boxes seem to be a distraction. Perhaps they could use the dim ansi code or be turned off.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Just looked at manpages on someone else's account with no colour highlighting, definitely missed it.
cyberferret 8y ago
Since back in my DOS programming days, I've lived in several different Hex editors when analysing data streams. Some great, some ordinary. I would have killed for colour highlighting like Hexyl seems to have. I wonder though, whether I can colour code 'blocks' to differentiate them? One of the things I seemed to do a lot in hex editors was to check out the differentiation in, for example, 72 byte blocks of data, so to be able to delineate 72 byte blocks in different colours in the hex editor would make it easier to see where each block starts/ends.

by Twisol 8y ago

vectorEQ 8y ago

haha, had exactly the same thoughts. the colours really makes it much much easier on the eyes to recognise things. well done!

joshenders 8y ago
Same thought except, I wonder why this isn’t a patch to xxd?
- Sean1708 8y ago
  I'm struggling to even find the canonical source code for xxd, let alone a way to provide a patch. You could probably email the address in the man page, but that's from 1997 so I wouldn't be too optimistic about getting a response. And even then it's quite likely that the original author considers xxd finished and would be reluctant to accept patches for it anyway. On top of all that the hard part of this work (cross-platform terminal colours) had already been done for the author, so the implementation was probably far easier than adding colour output to xxd would have been.
  - msla 8y ago
    Cross-platform terminal coloring was solved in the 1980s with termcap and then terminfo, for every terminal that's even come close to seeing mainstream use and which had colors in the first place. The libraries are part of the ncurses library and are shipped with every OS this stuff would build on to begin with. This also solves the problem of moving the cursor and drawing a screen in general.
    - Sean1708 8y ago
      Aren't termcap and terminfo linux (or maybe unix) only?
      - feanaro 8y ago
        termcap is supported on FreeBSD, at the least.
      - msla 8y ago
        Both of them long predate Linux. They're definitely Unix-flavored, but so's the Berkeley sockets library, and that's available everywhere, too. Ultimately, they're a library which is packaged with a database, and nothing about them is very system-specific except the terminal information in the database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo
      - ksherlock 8y ago
        termcap was written by Bill Joy in 1978. terminfo dates back to 1982.
    - simplicio 8y ago
      Eh, A lot of modern terminal emulators don't seem to bother providing termcap/info entries, or setting their own $TERM variables. In reality, most code just fires off ANSI sequences and hopes for the best. Looking quickly at the source for Hexyl, I think that's what the ansi_term library it uses does. If anything, I've found doing this works better then trying to muck around with ncurses, which often gets actively mislead by incorrect terminfo entries.
      - msla 8y ago
        ncurses wins once you use terminals beyond xterm.
    - ksherlock 8y ago
      termcap/terminfo styling is limited to features like underline, bold and reverse. No coloring, per se.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    xxd is distributed with Vim. I've never thought of xxd as being anything but a "Vim thing". That it had its own history (1990-1998) before being pulled into Vim is a TIL for me. Here you go: https://github.com/vim/vim/tree/master/src/xxd https://github.com/vim/vim/tree/master/src/xxd There might still be other versions of this out there, but I suspect most OS distros pick up xxd by way of packaging Vim. So if you work on some other xxd, you're probably in a dead fork. The man page is also from Vim: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/doc/xxd.1 https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/doc/xxd.1 My first patch to xxd, if I were to work on it, would be to fix the man page to indicate clearly that it's the xxd bundled with Vim.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- elteto 8y ago
  Because the author wanted to do his own, personal thing? I get the idea behind your question, but it irks me a bit since it implies a sort of responsibility to contribute to an existing piece of software. This is a net positive of course, but the beauty of open source is the freedom to work on the things you want to work on.
kps 8y ago
It's illegible in my terminal. Not a fan of the trend to hardcoded unicorn vomit.

cygned 8y ago

I have to admit, my first question in mind was how to disable colors because I do not use syntax highlighting at all.

vectorEQ 8y ago
but if you want to disable colours in this why not use hexdump or xxd :D . it's like the only feature it adds to standard hexdump tools
sifoobar 8y ago
Me neither. I did use it religiously for a long, long time; then tried without for a week and never went back. It's not like telling the difference between string literals and keywords was ever a major issue for me. I guess it could help short term when learning a new language, but I'm pretty sure it slows down overall progress.
- colordrops 8y ago
  How does it slow down progress?
  - dublo7 8y ago
    For me it doesn't. It's a quick way to see that I made a typo when a keyword doesn't turn the right color, or that I closed a strong with the wrong quote Mark.
  - sifoobar 8y ago
    I find it's a bit like navigating using GPS, once I get there I still have no clue because I was mostly acting on cues. Slow compiles have the same effect for me, I get pushed out of flow and into reactive mode. The only way to write good code is to be proactive, and any features that interfere with that process are worse than whatever "problems" they "solve".
userbinator 8y ago
I'm also not a fan of the colouring, especially in this application, because when you're looking at a hexdump chances are you don't care about ASCII or whitespace --- and it's not as if you couldn't tell whether something is in the ASCII range, given the character representation in the right column anyway. The border lines don't help much either and seem more like decoration; addresses to the left and an indexing header on the top, like the traditional "canonical" hexdump format, would be far more useful.

hwj 8y ago

What are line numbers in context of a binary?

twtw 8y ago
Addresses.
- archgoon 8y ago
  File offsets; not addresses :) I assume the tool isn't reading ELF format files and working out the memory address.
Twisol 8y ago
Right, I was being a bit loose there. I meant something like how `xxd` displays the number of bytes up to the current output row. Just something to give context of where you are in the file. 00006980: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
msravi 8y ago
You can quickly find position of byte number X using: line number = floor(X/(bytes/line)) + 1 column offset = X % (bytes/line) + 1 Or it could just print byte numbers instead of line numbers.

kbd 8y ago

> I admit, my first thought on seeing the title was "What's wrong with xxd?" My first thought too. Then I looked and saw it was nice, and then I noticed it's by sharkdp. He really has a knack for improving on things you thought were fine (fd and bat being other examples).

avidal 8y ago

Looks like the screenshots on Github are outdated. I just ran it locally and it does print out offsets in a new left-most column. edit: Added in this commit: https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl/commit/91a119f4537f746045c81e0bdc699e3b95fe7148 https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl/commit/91a119f4537f746045c8...

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Liked that though the boxes seem to be a distraction. Perhaps they could use the dim ansi code or be turned off.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Just looked at manpages on someone else's account with no colour highlighting, definitely missed it.

cyberferret 8y ago

Since back in my DOS programming days, I've lived in several different Hex editors when analysing data streams. Some great, some ordinary. I would have killed for colour highlighting like Hexyl seems to have. I wonder though, whether I can colour code 'blocks' to differentiate them? One of the things I seemed to do a lot in hex editors was to check out the differentiation in, for example, 72 byte blocks of data, so to be able to delineate 72 byte blocks in different colours in the hex editor would make it easier to see where each block starts/ends.