Hex Workshop Changelog

What's new in Hex Workshop 6.8.0.5419

Sep 13, 2014
  • ENHANCEMENTS:
  • An integrated text-based structure editor was added to help users easily create and maintain structure definitions. The structure editor includes syntax coloring, in-line error reporting, and automatic structure library re-loading on save.
  • Color maps are now editable from within Hex Workshop using an integrated text editor supporting syntax coloring.
  • The Expression Calculator now supports syntax coloring.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Resolved crash when copying hex values over 4K to the clipboard.
  • Improved default font sizing and layouts for high resolution displays.
  • Table column widths are now persisted across application restart for the Structures, Find Results, Compare Results, Checksum Results, and Bookmarks windows.

New in Hex Workshop 6.7.3.5308 (Oct 11, 2012)

  • ENHANCEMENTS:
  • Users can now expand or collapse all top level root structures from the "Tools\Structure Viewer" menu.
  • Child structures can be fully expanded or collapsed from either the "Tools\Structure Viewer" menu or the right-click structure viewer context menu.
  • The right-click document context menu's relative and absolute jump to offset functionality now supports 64-bit values.
  • The Fill bytes option is now enabled when editing disks and drives.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Hex Workshop occasionally failed to insert data to a new or zero byte file.
  • Unnecessary application startup delays were removed when starting without a network connection.
  • Users may now copy text from the Results' Output Window.
  • Users may now copy and paste within the toolbar's goto offset and goto sector text controls.
  • Hex Workshop was unable to write license files in some situations.
  • User are now forced to overwrite data as opposed to inserting and deleted data when working with fixed length sectors. S5 records no longer causes Motorola S-Record imports to fail

New in Hex Workshop 6.7.2.5284 (Oct 11, 2012)

  • ENHANCEMENTS:
  • Users can now define enums inline of a structure definition.
  • An enum may now be embedded within a bitfield. Some limitations apply, see online help for more information.
  • Users may now view and edit bitfields in both decimal and hex. Previously, users were limited to decimal.
  • The Tools menu includes menu options to apply bookmarks and structures to selected Find All Instance find results.
  • Users can more easily swap the source and target comparison files using a new "Swap" button in the Compare dialog.
  • The Fonts and Filters preference settings dialog now supports deleting user-created character filters.
  • One can now defined keyboard shortcuts to regenerate and clear checksums. Resetting keyboard shortcuts may be required to take advantage of these additions.
  • The version check feature provides more information including the latest available versions both under and out of maintenance.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Highlighting rectangles are now displayed in the hex area of the editor regardless of "Flip Bytes in Editor" setting when viewing data grouped by a single byte. Highlighting rectangles are not supported when grouping by 2 or more bytes with byte flipping enabled.
  • The popup Goto dialog now sets the focus to the address/offset control instead of the OK button.
  • Online help now includes descriptions of the filepos and filelength bookmark variables.
  • Visual checkmarks used to indicate state (i.e. displayed columns, data inspector data types) are now shown properly.
  • Users can now modify 32 and 64 bit bitfields in the structure viewer. Previously, only the first byte of the bitfield was applied.
  • When double clicking on the caret and cursor positions on the Hex Workshop status bar, a binary representation of the address is now placed on the clipboard using the correct byte order.
  • Hex columns within the structure viewer are consistently displayed and editable using Big Endian byte ordering (1 == 0x0001).
  • The Data Visualizer did not display properly when opening a file with a fixed length column width (as opposed to Fit To Window).

New in Hex Workshop 6.7.0.5247 (Jul 30, 2012)

  • ENHANCEMENTS:
  • Hex Workshop now includes better code page support including the ability to view text rendered using code page based character maps, code page aware searching, and the ability to specify the target character set and code page used to render bookmarks and structures.
  • Structure definitions now support explicit data types for UTF-8, ANSI, and Unicode character sets along with a "codepage" pragma for rendering ANSI characters.
  • Users may now export to UTF8, ANSI, or Unicode text files.
  • A new "Copy Address" option was added to the Edit menu, right-click document context menu, and structure viewer right-click context menu.
  • Structure definitions now support referencing individual bitfield components from conditional expressions.
  • A new Structure Viewer preferences allows users controls whether added structures are automatically expanded or left collapsed.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Hex Workshop no longer crashes when passing a relative path via the command line.
  • Launching online help now displays context senstive help sections when focus is on the Results Windows or Structure Viewer.
  • The replace dialog now properly displays the hex search strings for quads and uquads. Additionally, the hex search string is now updated when swapping the byte order.
  • The replace dialog not properly validates data input based on search type.
  • The structure viewer no longer displays extra leading zeros when displaying lengths.
  • The Structure Viewer now updates structure content on undo/redo operations and when changing sectors.
  • Floating structures now remain expanded when swapping between documents.
  • The user interface renders quicker with many structures

New in Hex Workshop 6.6.1.515 (Aug 9, 2011)

  • Resolved Hex Workshop crash when attempting to specify color settings.
  • Added Ctrl+Shift+G keycuts and menu items for legacy Goto Sector popup dialog.

New in Hex Workshop 6.6.0.5152 (Aug 7, 2011)

  • Enhancements:
  • New wildcard hex searching allows users to search for hex strings such as 0xAB??EF and 0xA?CD.
  • The Find Results window now supports multiple selections. Users can select multiple findings for removal, highlighting, bulk bookmarking and bulk structure application.
  • Users can now specify a range when searching a document. Range options include searching: the entire document, a selected region, or a specific offset and range.
  • Adding structures is now quicker with refined default structure selection. Hex Workshop will automatically select the last used or first found valid structure.
  • Defining Structures is now easier with support for reloading of structure libraries.
  • Users can now copy addresses and values from the Find Results and Bookmarks windows.
  • Bookmark results, structures listings, find results, comparison results, data inspector values and checksum results are now exportable to tabbed text, CSV, HTML, XML or RTF by right clicking on the window and selecting "Export Contents" from the popup context menu.
  • Character Distributions are now exportable to XML, HTML, and RTF in addition to CSV and tabbed text.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Resolved issue where users where unable to copy and paste after pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in the editor without a selection.
  • Resolved application start up issue when the sector editing feature is not included as part of installation.
  • Copying using Ctrl+C keyboard shortcuts now work properly for all dockable windows within Hex Workshop.
  • Character Distribution exports are now encoded using UTF-8 and are no longer truncated.
  • Hex Workshop no longer faults when closing a document while Find All Instances is executing.
  • A number of typos were fixed in the application error messages.
  • Online help now displays properly from the Replace dialog.
  • A number of memory leaks were identified and resolved.
  • Default Font was changed from "Courier" to "Courier New".
  • Hex Workshop now correctly calculates complex math equations according to the order of operations. Previously, Hex Workshop calculated "5-1-1+2" as 7 (5-(1-1)+2) instead of 5.

New in Hex Workshop 6.5.0.5019 RC 1 (Jan 10, 2011)

  • ENHANCEMENTS:
  • Hex Workshop is now fully 64-bit compatible. The installer will automatically install either 32-bit or 64-bit application software based on the target operating system.
  • An Expression Calculator was added to Hex Workshop that allows users to enter C/C++ style complex expressions including logical, bitwise, and arithmetic operations. Users can also read and modify data.
  • A new Data Visualizer feature allows users to view documents rendered as an image with custom palettes. The Data Visualizer helps users identify patterns within their data.
  • Users can now add Functions to their Structure Definitions to help parse file formats and perform routine operations (e.g. updating a checksum). Structure Functions include a rich expression framework with variables, conditionals, and iteration.
  • A "HalfFloat" data type (IEEE 754-2008) was added to the Data Inspector, Structure Viewer, and Bookmarks. HalfFloat is a 16-bit half precision floating point number.
  • The Structure Viewer now includes a size column, support for structure pointers, nested switch statements, if statements, and a richer and more user friendly structure validation framework.
  • Users can now view structure validation status from both the Add Structure Dialog and from the structure viewer itself.
  • The right-click content menus located with the editor now include more icons.
  • Byte, UByte, Word, UWord, DWord, UDWord, QWord, and UQWord added as built-in types for the structure viewer.
  • Structure Parsing is much faster than previous versions.
  • Users can now paste hex strings that did not originate from Hex Workshop into the hex area of the editor without using the Paste Special feature.
  • The Bookmark address, length, and array count rules now support bitwise &, |, ^, operations and include byteflip functions.
  • Hex Workshop now includes a plug-in API that allows C/C++ developers to extend Hex Workshop's functionality through document manipulation. Developers can modify documents, update caret position and selection, add and remove bookmarks and structures, and calculate checksums.
  • Users can export their settings and re-import them on another PC or at later time.
  • Display settings (Display Themes) are now exportable/importable and can easily changed at runtime.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Improved UTF8 character handled during product Activation.
  • Right-click "Hex edit using Hex Workshop" context menu selection, no longer crashes when invoked under SpeedCommander
  • Trailing nulls are stripped when pasting text into the text-area of the hex editing window.
  • Resolved improper menu enabling and disabling of "Flip Bytes in Editor" menu item.
  • Hex Workshop expressions now follow the standard C/C++ operator precedence for parenthesis, literals, arithmetic/bitwise/logical operations, comparisons, functions, and assignments.
  • Keyboard focus is now properly placed after deleting elements from the structure viewer and bookmark list.
  • Corrected Structure Viewer line numbers reported for warnings and errors located after a multiline /* */ style comment.
  • Resolved incorrect highlighting of the altered bytes and possible application instability when saving or closing altered documents.
  • Added better validation for "DATE" data type in Data Inspector. Hex Workshop will now display if outside the expected range.
  • Find by bitmask now compares the entire user supplied bitmask string instead of the first byte when reporting matches.
  • The Hex Workshop installer now migrate user settings from previous Hex Workshop v6.0.
  • Corrected data range for unsigned qword in Hex Workshop help.
  • Drop-down boxes displayed as part of in-line Structure Viewer and Bookmarks editing is now sized larger than the column width.
  • Bookmarks now support 64-bit addresses.

New in Hex Workshop 6.0.1.4603 (Jan 7, 2009)

  • Installed fixes to request reboot after installation and install missing application dependencies.
  • Fixed crash when displaying character distribution for an empty document.

New in Hex Workshop 6.0.0.4582 (Dec 30, 2008)

  • General Editing:
  • Enhanced character set/locale support. Hex Workshop is now a native Unicode application as opposed to a MBCS application allowing users to open and edit files with Unicode names.
  • Paste ASCII/Unicode into the Text Area of the editor.
  • Status bar now includes the mouse cursor position, editor caret position, and the file size/selection length.
  • Font Script is now settable from Font Selection (Preferences) and allows users to select different character sets for the Text area.
  • Users can now select the Character Filter from the Hex Workshop Toolbar.
  • More powerful and customizable color marking and selection. Users can now define separate foreground, background, and border rectangles for hex and text display of modified bytes and other editor highlighting.
  • Added the ability to suppress the undo overrun warning; default value of the undo buffer was increased to 256K.
  • Added complete control of working directories for opening, saving, importing, exporting, and comparing files. Users can now change the location of bookmarks, character maps, color maps, structures, and temporary files.
  • Preferences are now organized in a Tree format as opposed to Tabs.
  • New Quick Goto box in the toolbar allows for jumping to absolute offsets and jumping to relative offsets without opening any dialogs. The Quick Goto box also retains the last 16 most recently used goto/jump operations.
  • Added tooltips to editor area for dividers.
  • Data Inspector:
  • Editing is now invoked by a single click.
  • Data inspector on the right edge of the application can be pinned to maximize editor viewing.
  • Data Inspector elements are now grayed when not applicable.
  • When selecting or editing from the Data Inspector, the data is now highlighted in the editor.
  • Structure Viewer:
  • Editing is now invoked by a single click.
  • Structure Validation status is displayed in the Add Structure Dialog prior to adding a new Locked structure
  • Data type wchar was added to display and edit Unicode strings or wide characters.
  • Quicker structure definition parsing in the structure viewer.
  • Color highlighting now marks selected structures, unselected structures, and structure data members within the editor.
  • Behavior options added to structure element selection, including: setting the caret position in the editor, scrolling the structure data into view, and selecting the data within the editor.
  • Users can now copy the structure view to the Windows clipboard as text.
  • Buttons added for jumping to the start and end of the structure data and selecting the structure data within the editor.
  • Structures are automatically selected when added.
  • User can now show/hide columns using the right-click context menu.
  • The structure viewer can now be pinned to a Hex Workshop edge to maximize editor viewing.
  • Enumerations now support both signed and unsigned enumeration values using either:
  • #pragma enumsign("signed")
  • #pragma enumsign("unsigned")
  • Color Maps:
  • Added ability to set independent foreground, background, and border rectangle colors for both the hex and text areas within the editor.
  • Character maps can now include comments that are displayed when the user hovers the mouse cursor over highlighted data.
  • Added ability to suppress the unsaved color maps warning when closing a file.
  • Bookmarks:
  • Editing is now invoked by a single click.
  • Behavior options added to bookmark selection, including: setting the caret position in the editor, scrolling the structure data into view, and selecting the data within the editor.
  • Added color highlighting to mark selected and unselected bookmarks within the editor.
  • Added ability to suppress the unsaved bookmarks warning when closing a file.
  • Added preferences for loading bookmarks automatically by file extension.
  • Bookmarks are automatically selected when added.
  • User can now show/hide columns using the right-click context menu.
  • Bookmarks are now sorted by offset.
  • Bookmark files can now be opened from the command line with the new /BOOKMARKS command line argument.
  • Character Distributions:
  • Histogram graph is now included to show the character distribution.
  • Character Distribution feature shows the user where a character is clustered within a file.
  • Updated Character Distribution List includes a primary and secondary sort.
  • Compare:
  • Behavior options added to compare result selection, including: setting the caret position in the editor, scrolling the structure data into view, and selecting the data within the editor.
  • Compare dialog can now be defaulted with the last compared files or files opened in the editor through Preferences.
  • First difference is now automatically selected in Compare Result Window.
  • Added color highlighting to marked selected compare item within the editor.
  • Users can now set the compare block length via Advanced Compare Options.
  • Compare Dialog now includes a most recently compared drop-down box with the last 16 comparisons.
  • MRU recalls source and target file, offsets, length, match bytes, and resync window size.
  • User can now show/hide columns using the right-click context menu
  • Find:
  • Behavior options added to find result selection, including: setting the caret position in the editor, scrolling the structure data into view, and selecting the data within the editor.
  • Find All highlighting allows the user to select custom hex and text foreground, background, and border rectangle colors when finding all instances for a search string.
  • Find Next Selection and Find Previous Selection added to menus.
  • Added Find Next and Previous not matching selection; for finding the end of a repeating block of data.
  • First found instance is now automatically selected in Find Results control.
  • User can now show/hide columns using the right-click context menu
  • Checksums:
  • Added ability to generate SHA2 (224, 256, 384, and 512 bit), RIPEMD (128, 160, 256, and 320 bit), Tiger and Whirlpool hashes.
  • Added ability to generate both 16 and 32 bit Custom CRCs during generation.
  • Added ability to display checksums for multiple files without clearing results.
  • Added document, offset, and length columns.
  • User can now show/hide columns from the right-click context menu.
  • Added ability to remove a single checksum without clearing all.
  • Now when a file is closed and Hex Workshop is unable to re-checksum a file or selection of a file, the results window displays the results as disabled. Re-opening the file enables re-checksuming.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • Right-clicking in the editor now sets the caret position; unless right-clicked over a selection.
  • Users are now able to disabling the Hex Workshop Context menu extension.
  • Resolved crash when Hex Workshop viewed a document in a large window with the byte per line set to "Fit to Window"
  • Force Group By to 2 bytes when viewing data in Unicode.
  • Resolved issue where the edit caret was displayed in the offset area after a focus change.
  • Resolved missing tooltips in the Hex Workshop Toolbars.
  • Fixed display bug where the Offset Header was drawn with different 3D border rectangles.
  • The Data Inspector, Structure Viewer, and Bookmark Results Window now abort editing if scrolled during while in-place editing is active.
  • Resolved issue where entering ASCII/Unicode strings of smaller length resulted in uninitialized data at the end of string in the Data Inspector, Structure Viewer, and Bookmarks.
  • Toolbar Buttons now enable and work correctly for floating windows.
  • Color maps now filter out duplicate hex sequences and character ranges.
  • Compare now works properly with large file (greater than 0xFFFFFFFF).
  • Fixed issues in saving, restoring, and copy sectors.

New in Hex Workshop 5.1.4.2158 (Sep 4, 2008)

  • ENHANCEMENTS
  • Users can now copy structure contents to the windows clipboard by right-click on the structure and selecting "Copy" or pressing Ctrl+C.
  • A new "/COMPAREWITH" command line option was added to enable launching file comparisons from a command prompt or another application.
  • BUG FIXES
  • Resolved buffer/file corruption possible when inserting or deleting data within a document.
  • ColorMaps now display correctly in files over 4 gigabytes.
  • Resolved a ColorMap file saving issue that resulted in corrupt map files.
  • Fixed display issue where odd/even hex column backgrounds could
  • be incorrect for altered text, character maps, and color maps.
  • Switching from Dec to Hex modes in the Goto Dialog when no data was present resulted in a random hex value (as opposed to blank or zero).
  • Search failed to find unicode strings
  • Resolved foreground/background color issues when viewing text area under a unicode filter.

New in Hex Workshop 5.1.3.4159 (Sep 4, 2008)

  • ENHANCEMENTS
  • Users can now copy structure contents to the windows clipboard by right-click on the structure and selecting "Copy" or pressing Ctrl+C.
  • A new "/COMPAREWITH" command line option was added to enable launching file comparisons from a command prompt or another application.
  • BUG FIXES
  • Resolved buffer/file corruption possible when inserting or deleting data within a document.
  • ColorMaps now display correctly in files over 4 gigabytes.
  • Resolved a ColorMap file saving issue that resulted in corrupt map files.
  • Fixed display issue where odd/even hex column backgrounds could
  • be incorrect for altered text, character maps, and color maps.
  • Switching from Dec to Hex modes in the Goto Dialog when no data was present resulted in a random hex value (as opposed to blank or zero).
  • Search failed to find unicode strings
  • Resolved foreground/background color issues when viewing text area under a unicode filter.

New in Hex Workshop 5.1.3 (Jul 23, 2008)

  • Increased support for files over 4 gigabytes in size. Most Hex Workshop operations now work correctly. Bookmarks are still limited to a 32 bit address space.
  • Export/Save as C Source and Java Source preferences now support padding or truncations of files or user selections that are uneven multiples of the export data type.
  • Structure Viewer now includes byteflip16, byteflip32, byteflip64, and addrof functions. Additionally, __parent__, and __this__ keywords were added to allow references to parent and structure offsets.
  • Hex Workshop now displays unicode (UTF-16) properly in the text column of the editor.
  • Hex Workshop now starts properly under Windows 2000
  • Hex Workshop can now open files with Unicode characters in the file name or path.
  • Bookmark foreground/background colors are now saved across application restarts

New in Hex Workshop 5.1.0 (Jun 14, 2008)

  • The Hex Workshop user interface includes updated icons and toolbars along with a new offset column header to highlight the current caret and offset positions.
  • The Structure Viewer panel now simultaneously displays and allows the editing of interpreted values in both decimal and hexadecimal. The bookmark, compare, checksum, and find panels were also updated to include both decimal and hexadecimal columns where possible.
  • The Structure Viewer file format now supports additional data accessors and more support for conditional data formats. - sizeof() returns the size of a variable in bytes - ubyteAt(), ushortAt(), and ulongAt() returns the 8, 16, or 32 bit value at the specified file offset or variable value. - switch() allows for conditional structures based on the contents of a variable.
  • F7 and Shift F7 keyboard accelerators jump to the next/previous Bookmark.
  • Users can now copy and paste binary data between multiple instances of Hex Workshop.
  • Users can now specify whether documents are titled horizontally or vertically during file comparisons.
  • A 64 bit shell extension was added to enable the Right-Click "Hex Edit using Hex Workshop" option under 64 bit operating systems.
  • The Hex Workshop license agreement was relaxed to allow either a single user on multiple PCs or multiple users on a single PC. Previously, the Hex Workshop license restricted use to a single user on a single PC.
  • Hex Workshop now defaults to displaying hex data grouped by 8 bit bytes (instead of by 16 bit word) and enabled automatical column sizing.
  • BUG FIXES - Users can now re-open structure definitions. Previously, Hex Workshop failed to re-open a structure definition if it was previously opened.
  • Hex Workshop no longer attempts to auto-load structure definitions with parsing errors
  • Restore Sectors failed to write sectors to the specified disk/drive and instead re-read the sectors.
  • Structures now retain thier expanded/collapsed state when users reposition floating structures or collapse and expand a parent structure/element.
  • Hex Workshop v5.1 falls back to the 4.x sector editing logic if unabled to open disks/drives using logic adapted for Vista UAC privilege escalation.