[Geany-devel] Binary files - a hangup fix and some more

Thomas Martitz thomas.martitz at xxxxx
Sat Feb 6 17:22:29 UTC 2010


On 06.02.2010 17:37, Алексей Антипов wrote:
>> Could you provide a test case to reproduce the problem?
>>      
> Take some binary/malformed file (a small ZIP archive is a good example) and try opening it with the latest SVN version of Geany (that can ocassionaly happen). You'll get a hangup with 100% CPU usage.
> If it is OK, try setting a "Default charset for opening files" to some 1-byte charset (e.g. ISO-8859-1).
>
>    
>> I don't see why we should support this. Geany is a text editor. Text
>> files don't contain NULL bytes. If you want edit binary files, hex
>> editors are more useful, regardless of what Notepad++ does.
>>      
> They are, but sometimes I want just to see what's inside (given an unknown or broken file that I need to extract data from). Even poor old Windows notepad can handle binaries - why can't this pretty editor?
> More, some editors (Notepad++ or Midnight Commander's builtin) have a builtin Hex editor, which is sometimes useful. I'm using Geany as a primary text editor both on Windows and Linux, and I just wanted to make it more universal.
>
>    
>> And as you said, make such files opening isn't enough at all, there are
>> certainly many places in Geany which rely on the fact files are real
>> text files and I don't think this is wrong at all. Geany is a text
>> editor.
>>      
> Sure. Even such simple things as changing file encoding/line endings will make a mess from your binary. But if we provide a very basic capability - that would be interesting. If we use this feature, there must be a warning like "You are opening a binary file in a text editor, this can lead to an unexpected result and we strongly recommend that you make a backup".
>
> If a plugin crashes or hangs the whole program due to some unusual sequence of symbols - that's a problem of this plugin, I think. The other question is that the plugin will give unexpected results on unusual data - but that's what the end user should be warned and care about.
>
> I do not intend to make you use my patches (except the first one, if you can reproduce my behaviour)- just a proposal I find interesting. At least, nobody would prohibit me to use the patch myself:)
>    

I would love this. I find myself needing additional text editors (like 
scite) because geany is unable to view binary files. I think the mixed 
content example in the first email shows why geany should support it.

Is that a costly feature or what speaks against it?

Best regards.



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