v0.3.0 - 2024-10-16

Showcase

Syntax highlighting and API help for Lua scripting:

Using StringDiff search option to find the string MARIO in a non-ascii character set

Video of using the new plugin system to decode strings in Paper Mario:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE9PKO8Gvo0

Changelog

UI changes

Hex Editor:

• Del key zeroes out the byte at cursor

Bookmarks window:

• Jump-to button in detail view
• Value edit input in detail view
• Context menu option to copy a bookmark's offset
• Add right click menu option to reoffset all bookmarks based on a known offset (read help label)

File diff window:

• Now takes the value types of bookmarks into account, showing the whole values of
  bookmarks instead of just raw bytes.
• Add "Highlight all" button to highlight all differences
• Add "Open this" and "Diff with..." buttons to speed up diffing
  subsequent versions of a file

Find dialog:

• Add help hover popups for the find type dropdown
• Add "string diff" and "pattern equivalence" find types. See the help popups ;)
• Add basic replace functionality to Ascii find

X86 assembly dialog:

• Add ability to jump to offset of decoded instructions

Root context menu:

• Add "copy selection as utf-8 text"
• Add "zero fill" (Shortcut: Del)

External command window:

• Now openable with Ctrl+E
• Allow closing with Esc key
• Add "selection only" toggle to only pass selection to external command

Open process window:

• Add UI to launch a child process in order to view its memory (hexerator doesn't have to be root)
• The virtual memory map window now makes it more clear that you're no longer
  looking at the list of processes, but the maps for a process.

Jump dialog:

• Replace (broken) "relative" option with "absolute"

Preferences window:

• Make the ui tabbed
• Small ui improvements

Lua scripting

• Replaced LuaJIT with Lua 5.4, because LuaJIT is incompatible with panic=abort.
• Add Lua syntax highlighting in most places
• Add Lua API help window (Scripting - Lua help)
• Add a bunch more API items (see Scripting -> Lua help)
• Allow saving named scripts, and add script manager window to overview them
• Add Lua console window for quick evaluation and "watching" expressions
• Scripts can now take arguments (args table, e.g. args.foo)

Plugins

New feature. Allow loading dylib plugins. Documentation to be added.
For now, see the hexerator_plugin_api crate inside the repo.

Command line

• Add --version flag
• Add --debug flag to start with debug logging enabled and debug window open
• Add --spawn-command <command>... flag to spawn a child process and open it in process list (hexerator doesn't have to be root)
• Add --autosave and --autoreload [<interval>] to enable autosave/autoreaload through CLI
• Add --layout <name> to switch to a layout at startup
• Add --new <length> option to create a new (zero-filled) buffer

Fixes

• Loading process memory on windows now correctly sets relative offset
• When failing to load a file via command line arg, error reason is now properly displayed

Other

• Analysis -> Zero partition for "zero-partitioning" files that contain large zeroed out sections (like process memory).
• Add feature to autoreload only visible part (as opposed to whole file)
• Replace blocking file dialog with nonblocking egui file dialog
• Update egui to 0.29
• Experimental support for custom color themes (See Preferences -> Style)
• Make monochrome and "grayscale" hex text colors customizable
• No more dynamic dependency on SFML. It's statically linked now.
• Various bug fixes and minor improvements, too many to list individually