Bug 123498

I don't agree. Hex editing is REALLY not common. (Almost) everyone edits text files, but how often do you edit binary files in hex mode?

Hi Thiago,

thank you for your comment. Well though it's not very common to use hex mode when editing text files, I would say, that there are enough situations where an experienced user could need it. Of course one could use a seperate hex editor, but since we have 3 different editors in KDE at the moment, I don't see why we should keep all the 3 that simple as they are. Why not creating one simple editor and one for experienced users?
Well, kate IS ALREADY designed for experienced users - I don't think that my mum knows anything about syntax highlighting. ;-)
So keeping in mind, that we don't need one editor to fit all needs, but do already have 2 or 3 editors to fit all needs, I still say, that I need a an editor with hex mode - so kate is the one I chose since it already has the most features.

IMHO editing binary files is very different from editing a text file. 

You need different features, like offset column, little-endian/big-endian, different number systems, that are unneeded in text mode.

That's why a dedicated app like KHexEdit makes much more sense.

Well, I didn't expect the integration to be easy. However, concluding that it doesn't make much sense because it's a complex task also doesn't make much sense for me.

You might probably know the application UltraEdit32. I don't think that the hex mode is integrated very well there. IMHO the whole look&feel suckz in comparison to kate. But UltraEdit has many features I'd like to see in a fully-featured (text?) editor, e.g. the block mode (or is it called column mode?) is very cool!

I see your point, that you don't want kate to be a universal editor but a text editor. This leads me to the question: why are there 3 text editors in KDE? I don't want to sound rude or bash someone's work, but IMHO the differences between kedit, kwrite and kate are so small, that I don't see the need for them.
Why not having a little text editor, a fully-featured text editor and a universal editor?

Hi,

Christian Loose wrote:
>          
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123498         
> 
> That's why a dedicated app like KHexEdit makes much more sense.


yes, please keep Kate as small as possible. It is already pretty big.

Erich

The trick is to make use of the component framework KDE has. Kate could be to editing what Konqueror is to browsing.
Since KDE 3.2 there is a hexview part for Konqueror available (although hidden per default as it triggers a complicated design bug), from kdeutils/khexedit/parts. The only reason it never turned into a hexedit part is that its author (ahem) wanted to do handling of GB-sized files perfectly. Well, he did not find the time, although everything else has been working smoothly. :/
If Kate would lend some code from KDevelop to allow to use other ReadWrite parts next to the kate module then different editors for different mimetypes should work there, too. I would like that very much :)

Any objections to me closing this a wontfix?

Kate is a *text* editor!

Well, there were no further objections to closing this as WONTFIX, so I'll do that.

Some additional reasoning: Such a hex mode would not only be difficult to code, it would also raise entirely new UI issues. Very many kate actions just do not make much sense for hex mode (indenting, commenting, wrapping, folding, spelling...), but others would likely be needed, so the GUI, too, would become considerably more complex. This really does not seem worth while for a text editor.

The same question could be decided entirely differently for a dedicated, and full featured IDE, however, so this may well be something that could make sense in kdevelop. For kate, I don't see it.