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010 Editor (hex editor) discounted today at bitsdujour.com

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peter.s:
"While not my working text editor (I still use Kedit and EditPad Pro for that, depending on what I am doing), this remains my everyday go-to tool for quickly examining and/or editing ANY kind of file from an explorer right click."

I don't understand the idea behind it; could you please comment about it?

Background:
- I have got (several, I think, but at least one editor doing hex (and regex, too) emEditor, which does the same (?) upon hex files than does 010, the premier prob being that you can NOT edit text in hex files and then assume the file isn't broken, or more clearly, if you try with 010, you'll break your files, as you would do with any other regular text editor doing hex additionally.
- So what's the special interest in using 010 for hex files (let alone for text files)? In other words, if there is some trick 010 DOES do, I'd be very willing to buy it for that, but currently, I don't see this usp of a special-hex editor in general and/or of 010 in particular.

xtabber:
If you know what you are doing, it is perfectly possible to use most any hex editor to edit text in certain files without "breaking" them.  For example, I have modified unencrypted messages in programs I used to distribute but which could no longer be compiled from source for various reasons.

010 is not unique in being able to do that, and much of its functionality is available in various other tools.  What it offers is convenience - a single program with which I can examine and, when appropriate, edit the contents of any file, text or otherwise, from an explorer right click. It can even edit disk file systems and in-memory processes directly.  One of the nicest features is templates which decode the header structures of many types of files.  The developer provides a library of these for commonly used file types (zip, pdf, exe, dll, etc.), but you can write your own.

Of course, as with any power tool, it's up to the user to be careful when using it.

x16wda:
For example, I have modified unencrypted messages in programs I used to distribute but which could no longer be compiled from source for various reasons.
-xtabber (February 02, 2015, 10:42 AM)
--- End quote ---

I've done the same thing, plus fix some stupid hard coded design/programming choices in a few progs, although I typically use HxD for that purpose. The template thing is an interesting idea, though... I will have to take a look!

peter.s:
Thank you, xtabber, for your very informative post!

So 010 seems to be somewhat superior indeed for people who know exactly what they do (which is difficult when it comes to binary files since e.g. if you search the web for something like "how to edit binary text files in a hex editor without breaking them", you will not get any relevant hits. (From my experience, when you try to replace n characters with n plus x or n minus x chars, it's already broken, even if x is quite small.) The header thing seems interesting, and the running processes thing, too. As for the easy right-click opening-as-binary of (not-running) files, emEditor can do that, too, but it's true, emEditor's "life" licence has become somewhat "expensive", the double quotes being there bec/of 150 bucks being regular price for some other editors just for their current version (which in some cases is not even developed further anymore), so this puts that price into a more favorable perspective, whilst on the other side, most current editors are not priced in that range anymore though.

On a personal note, I own some quite expensive, "programmable"/scriptable editors and did quite some stuff on texts within them, incl. multiple buffers (i.e. files just in memory, not on screen, too), and it was LOTS OF scripting then, bec/I stupidly avoided regex then. Since I've become quite "fluent" with AHK scripting, I finally delved into regex, and I very quickly discovered that for elaborate text processing, 1) regex is the tool of your choice (in AHK: regexreplace is as important as is regexmatch, and this remark applies to any other regex implementation, too), 2) it's available directly both in many editors and programming languages, too, and 3) by the latter, there is no need to shift text bodies from your scripts into an editor to run scripts of the editor's own, then re-export the results, but you can do it all within your scripting or programming language, within both clipboard and multiple variables (instead of the above-mentioned editor-created buffers), onto which you run (mostly) regex commands... and finally 4) that scripting making use of regex will ease and shorten up your necessary scripting to an incredible degree. Oh, and yes, there is a 5) : Special tools, applying regex internally, and presenting some text manipulation gui to the user (TextPipe et al., and then PowerGrep, as the premier representatives of this kind of sw), seem to add nothing to what your own scripting could do in a much more easy way: on the contrary, just as your try (= mine, some time ago) to include some text editor processing into your automated workflow, they just add unnecessary complications (and ain't that cheap, but that's no consideration here). To complete this OT: There is one good idea though that can be retrieved both from TextPipe and PowerGrep: Don't try to complicate your regexes beyond all measure, in order to prove to yourself how smart you are, but be humble and just do 3 or 4 regexes in a row for what you know some expert could have done in just 1 of them: The result is as good as with the 1-regex alternative, with both writing and debugging time minized.

Ok, enough said OT for the rather limited utility of text editors for text processing (= not: text / code creation), it seems 010 (over at bits or full price) is the buy of choice for people needing to work upon binary files (and knowing about them more than I do). ( Well, my original idea was, if you hamper with running processed, you'll very probably get a blue screen - well, let's say you should probably not try to work upon running core Win processes. ;-) )

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