this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Very interesting! Never read anything about binary editing. Cool project!
Obvious question: why not GTK4?
The main thing is that gtk3 is a little more stable and available for now. Gtk deprecates tons of functions seemingly at random, and I don't want to have to constantly re-code my project as they deprecate things. As for availability, Gtk3 is shipped everywhere as 3.24 rather than different distros having different versions, gtksourceview4 is shipped on older distributions then gtksourceview5 (meaning more compatibility), and if I ever wanted to port to other operating systems Gtk4 would be much harder than 3. Finally, before the starting Janus I was under the impression that no gtk4 apps could be themed, but I have since learned that that is not the case. Knowing what I do now, once they iron out more of the kinks I will definitely port to gtk4, but first I want to make sure everything works well.
As for binary editing, I took a very different approach to other editors. Most either convert the binary data to a code page (very confusing and nearly impossible to edit) or use escape characters, which is not a bad solution by any means but looks increasingly worse with the entropy of the data. I eventually came up with this approach, which I think maintains the simplicity of a notepad editor while allowing the functionality I meant to include.
Very interesting, thanks for the anwer!