Thanks, this is much needed. I will be running some comparisons of the output, and take a look at the code. From a quick look, it looks nice, I am very pleased with this effort.
As a viewer, I think you are right. There is are still a couple things on my agenda though.
- configurable Endianness
- maybe highlight byte when a value in the ascii column is selected
- general testing before release
- keybindings
- access to settings and keybindings from menu
After these couple of things, I will probably do an official release.
Beyond Viewing
I do have a couple of ideas on how I might implement editing. I will play around with these ideas on the side after an official release. I imagine some indirection during editing will be needed.
I think I might try to implement a shortcut to enable an input panel with the hex content from a line. That way on submission, validity checks can be applied to the edits on that line before writing back to the buffer, and then a new ascii column line can be generated on the fly. I also will need to develop an export command. I will probably have to manage undos or just have a discard edit command.
Large copy and paste blocks might be a bit trickier, but even if the plugin only allows simple edits per line, I think that would be pretty sufficient.