Some ideas for user experience improving view settings

[V4D]

Hi Maël,

I have now looked at your program a little more in depth and of course I have a few more ideas or suggestions again for improving the user experience just by a few extra view settings.

I've even made the effort to make a few mockups for demonstration and hope you like it.

Okay, let's start.

-The first and quite subtle one would be additional and a tiny little bit more complex settings for the byte group gaps. Like this:

HxD - MockUp - more complex gaps.png (132.71 KiB) Viewed 446 times

- In addition, I'd suggest that you can optionally also turn off the leading zeros on the byte counters.

- Also the possibility for a slight ghosting of the leading zeros in the offsets would be nice and would certainly contribute to better readability in my opinion.

- And now, what I'd like most and really ask for: A separate setting for the representation of zero bytes. Could be a custom color definition for example or just a "Zero Bytes Ghosting" switch. Might then look something like this:

HxD - MockUp.png (148.69 KiB) Viewed 446 times

And here you can see now a direct comparison of the original screenshot with my mocked up version with all proposed adjustments together:

HxD - MockUp.gif (198.83 KiB) Viewed 446 times

Don't you think all of that would really help to focus more at the most interesting parts of all the information available in binary files and let you see the structure and recognize patterns a lot quicker for example?

Please tell us, what you think about it.

Kind regards,
Tom

[Maël]

Thanks for your mockups and suggestions

Regarding the zero-byte ghosting I am not sure if I would implement it. The plan currently is to add support for structure views and UTF-8 text display, the latter of which would require redoing the drawing code quite a bit.

Splitting up based on values would increase the complexity of Unicode rendering significantly and likely slow down the display quite a bit. I used tricks to keep the speed reasonable for the alternating column support.

Then I plan to add some special highlighting in the hex view directly, to show structure information, which would interfer with the zero-byte ghosting highlighting.

Is there a special reason you want to blend out mostly 0 bytes, and not others? Is it for a special file format? Maybe there is another solution.