davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") (04/21/91)
In article <1991Apr18.204216.6994@ibmpcug.co.uk> gmurray@ibmpcug.co.uk (G Murray) writes: } I can't comment on Epsilon, but the main problem that I have noted with }both Brief and EMACS is that they can't handle Nulls. Brief seems to manage }every other possible byte value in a file except for 0x00. Which emacs are you referring to? GNU emacs handles nulls. From what I just read about freemacs, the author claims that it can edit its own binary so I assume it can handle nulls as well. Now for a few thoughts about binary editors: It seems to me that it would be very easy to write a binary editor-- easier than writing an ordinary text editor. I believe that text editors must worry about the appearance of the displayed text whereas this should not be a concern for a binary editor-- just format everything in columns to make it readable. Am I too naive here? It seems that editors which allow binary files to be edited (eg GNU emacs) do not take this approach. I would much rather edit a file which formats the binary characters in nice easy to read columns. -- John bitnet: davis@ohstpy internet: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM (04/21/91)
>>>>> On 20 Apr 91 22:21:55 GMT, davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") said:
John> It seems that editors which allow binary files to be edited (eg
John> GNU emacs) do not take this approach. I would much rather edit
John> a file which formats the binary characters in nice easy to read
John> columns.
These GNU Emacs add-ons sound like they do:
Emacs Lisp Code Apropos -- "hex"
hexl-mode 89-05-24
Keith Gabryelski, <ag@cbmvax.commodore.com>
tut.cis.ohio-state.edu:pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/s-is/misc/hexl-mode.el.Z
[^as-is !]
Edit a file in a hex dump format.
hex (1.0) 89-05-29
andy@ernie.berkeley.edu, <slcpi!treed, treed@shearson.com>
tut.cis.ohio-state.edu:pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/as-is/misc/hex.Z
Binary editing mode.