Comments on: Seven in a row

By: Changes in the air « Motho ke motho ka botho

Changes in the air « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:31:24 +0000

[...] that the lurch of console programs are out of the way, I have two minor changes to [...]

By: Dieter_be

Dieter_be — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 08:44:53 +0000

> you might know joe as one of the editor options in the Arch Linux installation sequence

background story for those who care:
I used to use joe (my boss at my first job was a big joe fan, I got it from him) for a while, so I included it in the Arch installer.
However, I’ve switched to vim a while back and noone cared enough (or: it’s not popular enough) to keep maintaining joe, so we don’t include it anymore.

By: And then there was one « Motho ke motho ka botho

And then there was one « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:34:24 +0000

[...] going to close out this little three-day foray into the maelstrom of console-based software with one I really like, and have been using quite a [...]

By: LM

LM — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:04:53 +0000

Nice to see a list of some hex editors. I liked kzap when I was using DOS and haven’t been able to get used to anything else. If anyone runs across a hex editor similar to kzap, I’d love to know. So far, the closest alternative I can find is NCurses Hexedit ( http://www.rogoyski.com/adam/programs/hexedit/ ).

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:02:24 +0000

As for hex editors, there’s also biew (or beye as it has been renamed, but there have been no releases since the rename):

http://beye.sourceforge.net/

It’s quite nice because it has multiple views: text, binary, hex, and disassembler. It’s menu driven and fairly easy to navigate. I rarely use a hex editor, but the built-in disassembler seems like it could be quite useful.

By: cwsnyder

cwsnyder — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:21:29 +0000

One of JOE’s main claims to fame for the old MS/PCDOS people (still surviving and with a good memory?) was that the keybindings could be matched to WordStar and WordPerfect. Remember DOS? Where an application would be written in 86Assembler and maybe clock in under 2K for a full screen editor?

By: Kulutusluotot

Kulutusluotot — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:05:22 +0000

I think last time I used a hex editor was in the late 80′s, when I used to code in assembler on my C64

By: Chubby Checker

Chubby Checker — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:06:35 +0000

dang, forgot to mention ‘shed’ which is also useful…

By: Chubby Checker

Chubby Checker — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:05:44 +0000

xxd works just great for converting to/from binary files. you can use whatever editor you want inbetween.

BTW, I do use hex editors/viewers all the time. or my own bin to utf-8 filter…

By: IsaacG

IsaacG — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:49:36 +0000

note: joe is no longer in the Archlinux repos.
For hex editing, I’ve used vim + xxd. The following .vimrc lines has vim use xxd to convert a file to hex and back from hex to binary when you are done. It runs on *.bin files. (I think I got it from the vim :help)

augroup Binary
au!
au BufReadPre *.bin let &bin=1
au BufReadPost *.bin if &bin | %!xxd -g 1
au BufReadPost *.bin set ft=xxd | endif
au BufWritePre *.bin if &bin | %!xxd -r -g 1
au BufWritePre *.bin endif
au BufWritePost *.bin if &bin | %!xxd -g 1
au BufWritePost *.bin set nomod | endif
augroup END