Bringing the largest disappointment first: this will be yet another release of Okteta, the KDE Hex Editor, in which it still cannot handle very large files (still loads files completely into memory). And another, minor one: bookmarks aren’t saved, either.
Sad, I know…
Now after you hopefully have coped with this and started to consider your participation in the development of Okteta 
let’s have the meanwhile traditional look (like done for 4.2 and 4.3) at what Okteta gained for the upcoming release:
For those who happen to have read the last blog entries there should not be any big surprise, though, the different additions have been covered now and then:
- Splitted views, so the same byte array can be looked at with different ranges and settings
- Data generators: are used both to create new byte arrays or to insert into existing ones (available: Pattern, Random, Sequence)
- “Select range” tool allows to directly enter the range of the selected bytes
- Embedded dialogs for “Select Range” and “Go to Offset” (not yet for Search/Replace)
- Drag’n'drop of data onto free space of the mainwindow creates new byte array with the data as content (still loads the files for URLs, and just takes the first option if multiple mimetypes are available)
- Values in the Decoding table can now be edited and are synched back to the byte array (not with UTF-8, handling of possibly changing byte count not done in time)
- Last, but best: the new Structures tool (from Alex Richardson)!
Not visible in the picture:
- “Export/Copy As…” has received another format: Base64
- Search/Replace tools also take UTF-8 input (but only case-sensitive for now)
More in-depth blog entry about the Structure tool is scheduled for next week, please stay patient if you are interested in this.
Redrawn from this release:
Other than written before here and here the headers of the Okteta libs and the Designer plugin are not yet installed in this release. So if you are looking to use the libs you would have to take a full copy of the sources for now. But for the 4.5 release of the KDE SC this should be finally happening, will soon again switch on the installation of both in trunk.
Face it, no real coder can live without a hex editor (or viewer at least). Okteta recently helped me debugging GIMP files, and was able to fix bug 214384 this way. The structure view will be a killer feature. Thanks!
Comment by Christoph — January 11, 2010 @ 12:47 am |
Christoph, thanks for the nice comment. Will use Skulpture in one of the next screenshots, to give back
Comment by frinring — January 11, 2010 @ 1:08 am |
I am definitely interested in ability to look at file structures. Depending on how hard it is going to be, I may add MPEG2-TS support (to replace awful .net application I have to use right now).
Comment by Jakub — January 13, 2010 @ 1:41 pm |
It may not be possible with the version released with KDE SC 4.4, but with a coming version (hopefully the next) it should be possible to create any structure you can think of. Currently it is possible to create any C struct/union, but if parts of it are generated at runtime depending on other values, you might not be able to create that structure.
Comment by Alex — January 14, 2010 @ 5:37 pm |
[...] Okteta, the KDE hex editor, coming with the KDE SC 4.4, is surely the Structures tool (see also the “All new Okteta features for KDE SC 4.4 in a picture”). Because this tool is just a few month old, his author Alex concentrated on the code and not on [...]
Pingback by Tutorial: Create your own Okteta structure definitions « Attracted by virtual constructs — January 16, 2010 @ 12:05 pm |
[...] 0.6 and 0.5 I missed to give updates, like done for 0.4, 0.3, and [...]
Pingback by All new Okteta features for KDE Apps 4.7 in a picture « Attracted by virtual constructs — July 31, 2011 @ 1:20 pm |