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Background Colors

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 02:44
by Kyudos
I'm working with fixed sized binary records, it would be great if HxD could have a banded highlighting of some sort.
For example, specify the 'band size' and background color - so HxD might alternately highlight blocks of 256 bytes.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 18:23
by pTd
I've used the 'Open disk image..' option to examine fixed length records. No highlighting, but if you regard the records as sectors, you can set the sector size in your case to 256 and get a division line between each record. You can also navigate quickly a record at a time using the skip buttons.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 05:35
by Kyudos
That's quite cool...thanks for the tip!

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 15:29
by danf84
Worth looking at Hex Workshop's view (attached).

Where the cursor is currently at, the column and the row number is highlighted in blue.
Where the mouse pointer is (not on the screenshot) the row and column numbers have darker (grayish) background, which is also reflected on the text panel.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 15:35
by danf84
Also it will be nice to colourize/alternate colours in a selection. Forgot to mention in the previous post that alternating colours (whilst not selected) would also be a very nice to have as it pleases the eyes. Having moved from Hex Workshop, it's feels somewhat dull in HxD now.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 21 Jun 2011 00:19
by hamishmcn
I too would love to have background colours, but my use-case is slightly different:

I look at a lot of mpeg2 program stream files, they have variable block sizes which are delineated by the start code "00 00 01"
It would be very helpful if I could define a pattern like 00 00 01 that was highlighted with a different background colour to make it easy for me to spot the different sections. Ideally I would have two or three such patterns: "00 00 01" so I could see when the blocks change, and a couple of specific ones eg "00 00 01 B2" (user data) or "00 00 01 00" (picture header).

Many thanks for your great product.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 06 Feb 2019 14:33
by Maël
Alternating odd/even column coloring exists since HxD 2.0. Other kinds of coloring regarding structural views is planned.

Color vertical color banding (opposed direction to odd-even column coloring) maybe in the future, if it doesn't interfere with the structure view.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 08 Dec 2019 01:07
by Vag
If you do rom hacking to modify retro video games, you open the rom file with a tile editor (e.g. Tile Molester), so you can see the data as graphics (and change the font at least). You see garbage and you see real game graphics. These graphics look like garbage/random hex values when you open the rom file in a hex editor, so you can't really distinguish them from program data. This means that when you are looking or searching for something in the file (using the hex editor), you have to look at everything, even the parts of the file that contain graphics, just because you can't remember exactly where the graphics are. But you don't need to look there. So, if in HxD you could color parts of the file that you know they contain certain things, you'd know immediately what they are. This would work like a label for parts of the file. Alternatively, you could grey out parts of the file, protecting them at the same time from editing.

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 30 Dec 2019 09:46
by Vag
Hi again,
I'd like to add something to my previous post. What I meant was to manually color/label parts of the data, so that you can easily know what you're looking at. I needed this feature, so I downloaded Hex Workshop, because I saw it supported it. Hex Workshop has a similar, but a little different feature though. They call it color mapping and when you choose a color for the selected bytes, it highlights every instance of this byte sequence. Another hex editor, Hex Edit has the feature I meant, coloring parts of data to label them (only the specific, selected bytes). I believe both features can be very useful and also that they can be combined. "Color labeling" or "Color masking".

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 02 Jan 2020 22:53
by Maël
Vag wrote: 08 Dec 2019 01:07So, if in HxD you could color parts of the file that you know they contain certain things, you'd know immediately what they are. This would work like a label for parts of the file. Alternatively, you could grey out parts of the file, protecting them at the same time from editing.
This would be part of a structure editor:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=999
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=889

Re: Background Colors

Posted: 05 Jan 2020 09:39
by Sander Bouwhuis
I just downloaded this hex editor and it looks really great! (I especially like the data inspector!).

I have the even and odd columns (of 8 bytes each) differently coloured (great!), but for some reason only the hex part is alternately coloured. How do I apply the same colouring to the text (decoded) part?
Colouring is missing in text/decoded part
Colouring is missing in text/decoded part
HxD64 missing colouring.png (173.18 KiB) Viewed 9349 times