BEdit Blog

Version 0.0.2 released!

There are many practices on how to develop software; OOP, reactive, the "modern C++" way, you name it. I chose what I would call features first.

I could've spent weeks making version 0.0.1 stable, look pretty, reusable, develop the GUI I plan on selling and maybe even making it MISRA C compliant - but instead I decided to develop more features. Only when you know all the features of what the software will contain, do you really know how the product should look as a whole.

As such, with the permission of Molly Rocket Inc. I decided to take the first version of the HHA file format and show how to use BEdit to view it. You can find the two articles as wiki post here on HMN. I enjoyed playing around with it, and with version 0.0.2 released I hope you do too.

Once upon a time (early previous year), I had a silly idea. Why can't my text editor read binary files?

I've since decided to stop developing the text editor, but a little now and then I went through my git history and found the correct commit where the binary viewer was still functional.

The idea was pretty simple, it took input in the form of

struct Data
{
    U32 magic;
    U32 size;
    I32 payload[64]; // Assuming size is 64
};
@0x00 Data

and would output the data in the file, starting from 0x00, in a formatted way. As this was integrated in my text editor I would get (almost) instant preview when I made a change to the struct. So when I saw the I32 payload[64] actually had a size of 128, I could easily change it... but it got tedious.

Wouldn't it be nicer if I could write

struct Data
{
    U32 magic;
    U32 size;
    I32 payload[size];
};
@0x00 Data

instead?

That's how BEdit started, an overgrown feature that proved more useful than the application I was developing. It has gone from nothing more than parsing a C-like type definition to running its own virtual machine.

It's not very often you deal with binary files, but even in its currently limited state I find it really nice to have when you just want to quickly double-check if that one flag is set.

I hope you enjoy it as well!