What's new in Hex Workshop

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Structure Viewer Enhancements - v6.7.2

• Bitfields now support embedded enumerations and in-place hex column editing of individual bitfield components.
• Enumerations can now be defined inline of a structure definition.
• The hex value column now consistently displays and allows editing of values in Big Endian byte order.

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Example definition:

  #include "standard-types.hsl"

  typedef struct bitfield_ex {
      unsigned int bits1_8                     : 8;
      unsigned int bits9_12                    : 4;
      enum bits13_14 { ZERO, ONE, TWO, THREE } : 2;
      unsigned int bits15_32                   : 18;

      // Optional data fields based bits13_14 variable
      switch (bits13_14) {
          case bits13_14.ZERO:
              int zeroOptions; 
              break;
          case bits13_14.TWO:
              int twoOptions[4];
              break;
      };
  } bitfield_ex;

Other Improvements - v6.7.2

• Version check now display more information including both the latest versions aviailable in and out of maintenance.
• A Swap button was added to the compare files dialog to ease switch source and target files.
• The Goto Address dialogs now set initial focus to the address control.
• Users can now delete user-created character filters from within preferences.

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Expanded Encoding and Character Set Support - v6.7.0

Hex Workshop support for character encoding and character sets was expanded across the application to include UTF-8, Unicode, and code page specific ANSI strings. Users may now select the code page for rendering ANSI string using Character Maps. Hex Workshop ships with pre-configured support for the standard OEM and ANSI code pages, along with EBCDIC and Mac. Additionally, users can add support for more pages by creating new character maps. The Hex Workshop structure definition language now supports pragma to specify the code pages and new keywords to designate between ANSI, UTF-8, and Unicode characters and strings. The Hex Workshop find/replace features are now character set and encoding aware. Users can now specify the character encoding and character set for individual bookmark elements. The text export facilities now support BOM markers for UTF8/Unicode along with a character set designation for ANSI text.

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Other Enhancements - v6.7.0

• Hex Workshop now includes a more modern application icon.
• A "Copy Address" menu item was added to the Edit and right-click document and structure context menus.
• The user interface renders quicker with many structures
• 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.

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Wildcard Hex Searching - v6.6

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Hex Workshop now supports wildcard hex searching down to a 4-bit nibble. For example, the search string "FF?D" would match on 0xFF0D, 0xFF1D, 0xFF2D, ..., 0xFFFD. Wildcard searching is supported both in interactive search and Find All Instances.

Searching within Ranges - v6.6

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.

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Find Results Versatility - v6.6

The Find Results Window now supports multiple selections. Users can select multiple findings for removal, highlighting, bulk bookmarking, and bulk structure application. Additionally, users can now copy the address or value from the Find Results Window.

 

Enhanced Export Capabilities - v6.6

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.

Additionally, character distribution export capabalities were expanded to support XML, HTML, and RTF in addition to CSV and tabbed text.

Bug Fixes - v6.6

Hex Workshop v6.6 includes the following 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.
  

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Native 32 or 64 bit Software - v6.5

Hex Workshop is now fully 64-bit compatible. The installer will automatically install either a 32-bit or 64-bit application based on the target operating system.

Expression Calculator - v6.5

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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.

Data Visualizer - v6.5

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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. By selecting or creating different color palettes users can quickly identify text sequences within binary data, patterns and repeating data, tables, and even palette-based images. In the left example, green ascii text is easily identified. One can also easily differentiate between UTF-8 and UTF-16.

Structure Viewer Enhancements - v6.5

The Hex Workshop structure viewer includes many enhancements:

• 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.
• 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.
• Byte, UByte, Word, UWord, DWord, UDWord, QWord, and UQWord were added as built-in types.
• Structure Parsing is much faster than previous versions.

All Changes

Please review Hex Workshop's version history for a detailed list of all changes.