Bless Hex Editor 0.6.1

September 19, 2018  

A long time ago, on a computer far, far away... well, actually, 14 years ago, on a computer that is still around somewhere in the basement, I wrote the first lines of source code for what would become the Bless hex editor.

For my initial experiments I used C++ with the gtkmm bindings, but C++ compilation times were so appallingly slow on my feeble computer, that I decided to give the relatively young Mono framework a try. The development experience was much better, so I continued with Mono and Gtk#. For revision control, I started out with tla (remember that?), but eventually settled on bzr.

Development continued at a steady pace until 2009, when life's responsibilities got in the way, and left me with little time to work on the project. A few attempts were made by other people to revive Bless after that, but, unfortunately, they also seem to have stagnated. The project had been inactive for almost 8 years when the gna.org hosting site closed down in 2017 and pulled the official Bless page and bzr repository with it into the abyss.

Despite the lack of development and maintenance, Bless remained surprisingly functional through the years. I, and many others it seems, have kept using it, and, naturally, a few bugs have been uncovered during this time.

I recently found some time to bring the project back to life, although, I should warn, this does not imply any intention to resume feature development on it. My free time is still scarce, so the best I can do is try to maintain it and accept contributions. The project's new official home is at https://github.com/afrantzis/bless.

To mark the start of this new era, I have released Bless 0.6.1, containing fixes for many of the major issues I could find reports for. Enjoy!

Important Note: There seems to be a bug in some versions of Mono that manifests as a crash when selecting bytes. The backtrace looks like:

free(): invalid pointer
Stacktrace:

  at <unknown> <0xffffffff>
  at (wrapper managed-to-native) GLib.SList.g_free (intptr) <0x0005f>
  at GLib.ListBase.Empty () <0x0013c>
  at GLib.ListBase.Dispose (bool) <0x0000f>
  at GLib.ListBase.Finalize () <0x0001d>
  at (wrapper runtime-invoke) object.runtime_invoke_virtual_void__this__ (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) <0x00068>

Searching for this backtrace you can find various reports of other Mono programs also affected by this bug. At the time of writing, the mono packages in Debian and Ubuntu (4.6.2) exhibit this problem. If you are affected, the solution is to update to a newer version of Mono, e.g., from https://www.mono-project.com/download/stable/.