6.1. Philosophical Questions | |
6.6.1.1. | Why did you start Bless? Aren't there enough hex editors? |
There aren't enough free (as in speech) graphical hex editors. The two main ones are khexedit and ghex. Khexedit hasn't been updated in years and ghex is moving very slowly. | |
6.6.1.2. | So, why didn't you contribute to one of the existing projects? |
I wanted to try out the mono/Gtk# combination for graphical applications and none such project existed. | |
6.6.1.3. | What kind of name is Bless? |
It is a wordplay on the word hex. Hex also means curse and a bless(ing) is the opposite of a curse. | |
6.2. Technical Questions | |
6.6.2.1. | How can I get the latest source of Bless? |
Bless now uses Bazaar-NG as its version control system. After you install Bazaar-NG on your system use the following command to get the latest version of Bless into the bless.dev directory (this might take some time): bzr branch http://download.gna.org/bless/bless.dev If you already downloaded a previous version (using the above command, not source tarballs) and want to update to the latest version use: bzr pull from within the directory that contains the previous version. very slowly. | |
6.6.2.2. | I don't like the way Bless displays data. Can I change it? |
Yes! Bless is highly customizable. Read the documentation at section Customization/Layouts. | |
6.6.2.3. | I am trying to save a large file (under the same name) but while saving Bless complains that there is no space left! I was sure I had enough space! What's going on? |
To be able to save a file under the same name (File->Save command) you need to have (temporarily) enough disk space to hold both the original and the new file. This happens because the new file is created in the /tmp directory and then moved to its proper position. For example if you have a 20MB file and edit it so that it becomes 21MB and the new file is supposed to be saved in the same storage device as /tmp, you need to have 20+21=41MB free space in that storage device to be able to save it. After a successful save, the original file is deleted, in this case freeing 20MB.Although this can be a problem (when there is not enough disk space), it can also be seen as a safety measure in case something goes wrong when saving. | |
6.6.2.4. | The data in the data areas isn't displayed correctly! What is wrong? |
On some systems the data in the data areas are garbled. This seems to be an issue with the font subsystem. What happens is that the font subsystem reports to Bless a different font width that the one that is actually used on screen. I haven't figured out why this happens or whether this is really my fault or a bug in the font subsystem. Anyway, for the time being, I have created a work-around: there is a preference called "FontWidthFix" in the preferences.xml file in the Bless configuration directory. This preference holds an integer value that is added to the font width reported by the font subsystem. If you have display problems play around with it, try positive and negative values, too. For example:
<pref name="FontWidthFix">-2</pref> | |
6.6.2.5. | Where does Bless keep its configuration files? |