Hexdump color highlighting

[hexpwn]

Describe the solution you'd like
Add the option to color code highlights in the hexdumps (like it is possible to highlight blocks in the graph view).

Additional context
This is a helpful tool for RE.

[ITAYC0HEN]

Hi! thanks for the suggestion :)
Can you share more information about how you want it to look? If you'll find some examples and share screenshots from other applications it will be great!

[hexpwn]

I'm not the best with UI design but I tried showing what I was thinking about...

If you select a portion of the hexdump you can right click and be presented with the color picker.

This would set the background of the font in the hexdump to the chosen color.

[XVilka]

What I think that hexdump should support multilevel/nested highlights. Basically to allow the multiple parts of the hexdump to be highlighted, these areas can overlap and be nested, and the colors should be mixed properly whenever these areas overlap.
Long time ago I was working on the bvi fork called bvim with the ability to be scripted with Lua and programmatic highlight/selection creation:

• https://github.com/XVilka/bvim/blob/refactor/scripts/test.lua#L25
• https://github.com/XVilka/bvim/blob/refactor/bscript.c

[ITAYC0HEN]

Thank you. This is a nice idea :)
And thanks for taking the time to be creatve :P

[XVilka]

I think the feature to highlight (an un-highlight) with different colors should be also available from the plugins and Python API.

[karliss]

Having a mechanism for visually displaying ranges and reacting to interactions with them would be useful for many features so it would be valuable to create good reusable infrastructure for that. Here is a rough proposal of the code for that could be structured.

• HexdumpHighlighter - interface for module which can provide the highlighted ranges to hexdump widget and reacts to events
  • method: getHilightRanges(memoryRange) -> [HighlightRange] mehtod which returns list of HighlightRanges which intersect with requested memory range. Called by hexdump widget when position changes. Returns info about memoryRange instead of all executable becuse they could be dynamically calculated.
  • signal: highlightsChanged indicates when the highlights changed without change in position.
  • method: onRangeClicked(hilightRange, mouseEvent) called by hexdumpWidget when a hilightRange returned by this HexdumpHighlighter is clicked. Allows implementing interaction.
  • method: onRangeContextMenu(highlightRange, contextMenuEvent) called when a range is right clicked or context menu is triggered using keyboard, similar to onRangeClicked
  • method: onRangeXXX called for other kind of events if necesarry
• HighlightRange - structure describes single highlight range
  • memoryRange
  • id - can simplify highlighter code for reacting to onRangeClicked and other events
  • visual style
  • tooltip

Ideas for highlight style properties

• background color
• font color
• colored underline
• corner marker

Multiple instances of HexdumpHighlighter could be added to hexdump widget.

Ideas for uses of this mechanism

• Manual highlighting by user - Hexdump color highlighting #1945
• data structure visualization
• Diff visualization Diffing mode #1104
• Click for jumping to address Clicking on a Sequence of bytes to be highlighted #1411 Double click on an address on hexdump will seek to this address #1470
• Comment and flag displaying within hexdump widget
• plugins
• stack visualization, marking the address pointed by register