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AndrewWPhillips / HexEdit

Binary file editor for Windows
MIT License
171 stars 62 forks source link

HexEdit 5: things to consider #6

Open d0vgan opened 7 years ago

d0vgan commented 7 years ago

Andrew, thank you very much for your work, and let me share my impressions and comments. It's just my IMHOs, so please feel to consider or ignore them.

  1. Now the HexEdit 5 GUI initially looks overcomplicated to me. You know, all these docked windows everywhere, and these windows are large! Maybe it would be better to: 1) make them non-visible and non-docked initially; 2) make these undocked windows to be as small as possible.
  2. The "Go To" window really scares me now. I expected a small window where I need to enter an offset - and that's all! But instead, there is this big and complicated calculator...
  3. When I type some hex address in the "Go To" calculator window and then press Enter two or three times, I get a small window "Invalid Hex Digit". I'm not sure is it from the "Go To" window or is it from the main hex editing window at that point.
  4. The "Find" window has too thick window borders. Such thick borders are just waste of screen space...
  5. To avoid a feeling of "overcomplication" mentioned in the point 1 above, I've undocked and closed all the auxiliary windows to not see them on HexEdit's start and to show them only by demand. As the result, each time when HexEdit starts, firstly it very quickly shows its auxiliary windows (I asssume, while these windows are being initialized) and then hides them. I suspect this is a known "feature" of dialogs defined with WS_VISIBLE style - these dialogs are silently shown during the initialization even though a developer did not have any intention to show them during the initialization. The fix is very easy: just remove the WS_VISIBLE style from all the dialogs - this will make them to be invisible unless they are directly created/shown by the code.
AndrewWPhillips commented 7 years ago

I'll look into tidying these things up for the official release of 5.0.

Tcll commented 6 years ago

just to note, I usually close up all those windows as well... floating windows are just annoying imo, and could be better given as simple tool-input options no, that suggestion doesn't cover everything, but it does clean up quite alot.