Windows installer, data inspector edit and updater fixes
Improvements
The Windows installers are now signed
Huge thanks to SignPath for their help and sponsoring the certificate
The icons look slightly less blurry on low-resolution screens now
There's no longer any gaps in the selection of hex editor cells now with certain scaling factors
There's now better error messages when opening a data source failed. No more "Unspecified Error"
Opening a file that has already been opened now switches to its existing tab instead of just displaying an error
The auto-updater on macOS now automatically unpacks the new version instead of just opening the dmg
Bug Fixes
Fixed the Windows installer not correctly replacing all files
Fixed dependencies of the deb packages
Windows installer, data inspector edit and updater fixes - ImHex Release Notes | AnnounceHQ
The Extended ASCII display is no longer active by default now
If you upgraded to v1.38.0 before, you can disable it now by clicking on the Paragraph icon in the hex editor footer. If you didn't upgrade to that version, it will now be disabled by default
Fixed a bunch of issues with the updater that caused it to not work correctly, mainly on Windows
Fixed various issues with the pattern editor. Thanks to @paxcut
Fixed editing values in the data inspector not correctly working
Fixed a crash when clicking Cancel while opening a remote SSH File
Fixed a off-by-one in the process memory data source that would cause the first byte of a region to not display correctly
Fixed a crash when using the @ command palette command
Fixed sorting in the find view table being inverted
Fixed pattern files saved by the pattern editor not getting truncated on disk correctly
Fixed a crash when repeatedly opening files by drag-n-dropping them onto the ImHex Window
Previous Version
Features
Added multiple new Data Sources
A UDP Provider that can display UDP packets received on a specified port
A SSH Provider that can connect to remote machines over SSH and read files from there using SSH or SFTP
This is pretty cool as it allows live-inspection of the RAM of remote machines over the network by opening /dev/mem
Tons of improvements to the Pattern Editor. Huge thanks to @paxcut
The pattern editor now supports semantic syntax highlighting for the PatternLanguage!
Matching brackets are now highlighted when the cursor is next to one
Patterns can now be opened in an external Editor and ImHex will update the pattern live when the file changes
Parenthesis and quotes are now auto-closed when typing them
Breakpoints in the pattern editor can now be toggled by clicking on the line numbers instead.
Fixed various scrolling and scrollbar issues
New and updated Languages!
Added a French translation. Thanks a lot to @antigeky
Added a Polish translation. Thanks a lot to @Shadow775711
Added a Ukrainian translation. Thanks a lot to @RutarAndriy
Updated the Simplified Chinese translation. Thanks to @only9464
It's possible now to automatically chose the current system language with a fallback to English if the language is not available
Added mutliple new data inspector rows
Added a "Custom Encoding String" row, allowing quick decoding of selections using custom character encodings
Added a fp24 (24-bit floating point) data inspector row
Added a bfloat data inspector row
Added a configurable fixed-point data inspector row
Added a new Save Editor Mode and Simplified Pattern Editor
Marking Patterns with [[hex::editor_export]] will now make them show up in a new tab in the Pattern Data View
This allows for displaying only a limited number of fields in a simplified manner and letting you edit them
Additionally, this allows you to create Game Save File Editors using ImHex's Pattern Language!
By writing a pattern with these attributes, you can load the pattern using the new imhex --save-editor <pattern_file> option to show only a simplified save editor UI
This can also be done using the Web Version of ImHex by appending ?save-editor=<gist_id> to the URL where <gist_id> is the ID of a GitHub Gist containing the pattern file
Added a "Go To" command to the command palette for quickly jumping to specific offsets
Added new "Go To First/Last Element" buttons to the data inspector
Added option to show extended/unprintable ASCII characters in the Hex Editor view
Vastly improved the auto updater
Added support for updating nightly builds
Added support for switching between stable and nightly channels
Added command palette option to open / focus a specific view
Added option to skip over large chunks of bytes with the same value
Added all tools to the command palette for quick access
Added a Markdown renderer to ImHex
The Changelog in the About page now uses this to render the changelog nicely
Bookmark comments can now also use Markdown formatting
Added a new File Information command line option that can show various information about a file without opening it
This can be used by running imhex --file-info <file_path>
If this file is supported by a pattern, it will also be loaded and additional information can be displayed
This works by it calling the pattern's get_data_description function if it exists which may then return any markdown text to be displayed
This information will also be displayed in the Data Information view
Added a "Decode as Encoding" option to the right-click menu in the Hex Editor view for quickly decoding selected bytes using a specific character encoding
It's now possible to jump to Yara matches in the Hex Editor by clicking on them
Added a region sidebar list to the Intel Hex and Motorola SREC providers. Thanks to @sonorousfreq
Added keyboard shortcuts to jump to next/previous difference in the Diff View. Thanks to @Zman350x
There's now a interactive help button in the title bar that can be clicked to get information about specific elements in the UI
Added a RGBA8 and RGB565 minimap visualizer
Added option to the Minimap to shade cells based on the magnitude of the byte values
Added a Copy and Edit option to the right click menu of patterns in the Pattern Data View
Replaced the useless Constants View with a new Constants Search option in the Find View
This lets you search for a predefined list of common constants such as CRC polynomials
These can also be extended by simple constant json files
Improvements
Startup times have been significantly improved
On my machine, ImHex now starts up in ~60ms instead of taking multiple seconds
ImHex now also uses significantly less RAM. Idle it uses around 60MB now instead of over 200MB before
Pretty much everything has a nice new icon now
ImHex now builds and runs on 32-bit Windows systems
No official 32-bit builds will be provided, but you can build ImHex from source for 32-bit Windows now if needed using MSVC
Decluttered and modernized many parts of the UI
The main menu items now update automatically depending on what view is currently focused
This makes it much easier to figure out which option affects what, especially for things like "Open" which can apply to multiple views
Added Subpixel Font Antialiasing. Huge thanks to @paxcut
This makes all text look significantly nicer, especially on lower resolution screens
Fonts can now be more freely chosen using a new Font File picker that updates immediately
Font names in the picker are now also shown in their respective font
Frame Rate limiting is now much more precise and ImHex will wake up from sleep less often
ImHex will now also not limit the frame rate as much if there's any animations playing to allow for a smoother feel
Updated all dependencies to their latest versions
The Import Pattern popup now shows up much quicker. Thanks to @shewitt-au
Improved handling of cached providers such as the GDB provider to provide more up-to-date data and avoid hangs
The GDB provider now works without the server supporting the NoAckMode
This allows ImHex to be used for example to connect to a Nintendo Switch running Atmosphere
Modernized the TTY Console view with a new layout and a nice diagram showing what the different options affect
Instead of just minimizing the window when clicking the close button on macOS, it will now close the currently opened providers and only when clicked again on the welcome screen it will fully exit ImHex
Individual plugins may now be disabled from the Plugins settings page
ImHex now no longer uses the name "Providers" but instead uses "Data Sources" to better reflect what they do
Most of the Hex Editor settings are now saved
Included a launcher script with most builds that can be added to the PATH to easily launch ImHex from the command line
Integer Literals may now be used in binary patterns. For example 12 34 ?? u32le(123)
Hashes are now being calculated in a background thread as to not freeze up the UI anymore
Bug Fixes
Certain achievements now no longer trigger every time ImHex is started
Fixed a crash when using the Edit -> Disassemble Selection option before the Disassembly view has been opened
Undo now works for importing patterns in the pattern editor
Fixed many crashes related to the pattern data view
Things like sorting or filtering should now work much more reliably
Fixed the --reset-settings command line option not working
Fixed searching for negative numbers in the find view not working correctly
Fixed some crashes on Wayland when exiting ImHex
Empty Intel Hex and Motorola SRec files no longer appear as being one byte long
Fixed issues when reordering toolbar items
Fixed the Open File in Explorer option not working correctly on Windows
Fixed Auto Backups not being properly created after the first time. Thanks to @paxcut
If a crash happens in a background thread, ImHex is now able to properly handle the crash instead of just silently exiting
Artifacts
Added new ARM64 builds for Windows and Linux
Added new Snap packages for Linux
Added new Flatpak packages for Linux
Added a Fedora 43 rpm package
Added a Ubuntu 24.04 deb package
Pattern Language
Templates are now much better supported. Huge thanks to @AkiSakurai
They can now be nested properly
Their scoping now works much more sensibly
If you used Templates before, you might need to adjust your patterns. The scope of parameters passed to templates is now that of the template instantiation, not where the variable is actually used. So it's no longer necessary to use parent
sizeof(SomeType) now works when there's pointers involved
Many functions that previously only worked with the main section are now section-aware
Conditionals now support short-circuit evaluation
Fixed many fixes that caused crashes when errors happened in attributes
Pattern post-processing finishes now much much quicker
Parsing of floating point literals is now no longer locale dependent
Fixed patterns passed to functions by references having their name changed unexpectedly
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