Fish tank with Puck the Fish Fish tank with Puck the Fish Water on the floor spelling Fish
 

I’m Bringing Hexy Back

July 31st, 2009

Hooray, it’s Hex Fiend 2, a nearly complete rewrite of Hex Fiend that incorporates even better techniques for working with big files. Hex Fiend is my fast and clever hex editor for Mac OS X.

Click On Me To Get Hex Fiend

This app is about exploring the implementation of standard desktop UI features in the realm of files too large to fully read into main memory. Is it possible to do copy and paste, find and replace, undo and redo, on a document that may top a hundred gigabytes, and make it feel natural? Where do we run into trouble?

More on that later. For now, here’s what’s better about Hex Fiend 2:

  • It’s embeddable. The most requested feature was "I want a hex view in my app." Now it’s really easy: Hex Fiend 2 is built as a relatively slim shell on top of a bundle-embeddable .framework. There’s a real API, sample code, and everything. See the Developer section of the Hex Fiend page.

  • It’s faster. All around. Text rendering is speedier, and the backing data representation more efficient. It needs less I/O too.

    The save algorithm is especially improved. For example, inserting one byte at the beginning of a 340 MB file and hitting Save would take 52 seconds and 340 additional MB of temporary disk space with Hex Fiend. In Hex Fiend 2 it’s reduced to 22 seconds and requires no temporary disk space.

  • Better UI. It supports discontiguous selection. Scroll-wheel scrolling no longer feels weird. You can group the bytes into blocks (credit to Blake), and you can hide and show different views (thanks to bbum). The big dorky line number view now shrinks to fit. The data inspector panel is inline. It has Safari-style inline find and replace and “pop out” selection highlighting.
  • Long operations support progress reporting, cancellation, and don’t block the UI. For example, find and replace now has a progress bar and a cancel button, and you can keep using your document (or others) while it works.
  • Longstanding bugfixes. Backwards searching is now optimized. Certain coalesced undo bugs have been addressed. There’s some basic cross-file dependency tracking.

I hope you find it useful.

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The Internet!

π = 3.2851405312

Karsten

awesome news!! looking forward to seeing the new version, unfortunately the links are broken :-/

Karsten

Karsten

ok, just figured that the links are relative and not absolute, which makes them only work and appear properly on the main page.

new version looks great!

ridiculous_fish

Link’s been fixed. Thanks for noticing!

Ahruman

The “a real API” link is still broken.

Bill Johnson

OMGS HEX FIEND 2.0!!!111 SOOO EXCITED. Yes I love Hex Fiend, and have occasionally run into problems with giant files.

Blain Hamon

Woohoo 2.0! Hex Fiend has saved my bacon on quite a number of occasions. BTW, the API link works for me.

(Okay, I posted just for adding to π )

John C. Randolph

Peter, this is a huge service to the community. Thank you again.

Jennings A.

Where can I donate?

Brian W

Thanks! This is awesome.

Martin

Hey fish, so glad you are blogging again!

Mattt Thompson

Just got a chance to check it out, and it looks like a great update. Brilliant UI touches, like the segmented Hex input for the find panel.
Hex Fiend is a well-crafted tool that every serious Mac programmer should have in their arsenal.

Anonymous

Does it fix the issue where files would not open with 16-byte wide columns after you changed the font size? Reading a file with 12 or 14 byte wide columns can get really annoying, and having to resize every window after it opens is also annoying. That’s the only real problem I’ve had with older version of Hex Fiend, otherwise it was a joy to use.

(Also the comments are nearly invisible here, I had to highlight them to read them. Is that a rendering issue on my side or not?)

Anonymous

It is awesome that you came out with Hex Fiend 2.0. So is the pi/relative prime thing. Like the previous poster, I want to post a comment just because of the cool spam filter.

Anonymous

Well, I tried it, and apparently the size problem is kind of overshadowed by the font setting not working at all, but apparently you know that already.

Here’s another bug: The mouse wheel doesn’t work when over the line number column.

Also, I’d really like to see the old rendering style back. The new one is more compact, but also a lot harder to read than the old one with spaces between each byte, and separators between words. It’d also be nice if the line numbers column got its smaller font size back.

Finally, I’ve never been a fan of the behaviour of opening a new window when clicking the icon and no windows are open. I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to start a document for scratch in Hex Fiend, and I suspect most people are the same. This only forces me to close the useless window that I didn’t want. This behaviour may make sense for a text editor where you actually do write documents from scratch, but this is such a rare occurrence in a hex editor that it seems strange to have it there.

Raving Romulus

For some reason I expected to be able to select whole bytes and words by double and triple clicking on them, similar to word and sentence selection in most of cocoa text fields.

steve

Hey fishes,

I fix a bug in the vertical scroller handling (Unsigned conversion bug)

What can I do to commit my fix. I need a svn auth.

Thx

Butterwaffle

Hi Fish,

Thanks for releasing Hex Fiend 2. I really enjoy it. Perhaps I should stop here so you can enjoy unadulterated adulation… but no. Sorry. While the Hex Fiend largely quenches my base 0×10 thirst, now I find myself itching curiously. Mainly because, while the click and drag selection allows me to easily change the offset and size used to interpret bytes as floats or big ints, I only get to see a single float or big int at a time. It would be nice when the selection is too large for an atomic type to see an array – even though this would require an extra knob to specify 4 or 8 byte floats/ints. Another (vastly cooler but perhaps ridiculous in implementation complexity) way to scratch the itch would be to have a “struct creator” interface that lets you save interpreted selections from different offsets into a new pane, and perhaps change the offset of all the entries in the pane at once in order to explore arrays of structs in files. You could even generate some C code to create a real struct that matches what’s shown in the pane contents. Ahhhhh. Now the itch has been scratched, at least a bit.

And thanks again for Hex Fiend 2.