Okteta

Having previously complained about KDE4 on Fedora 9, it is only fair that I also mention something I like about it.

KDE 4.1 comes with Okteta, a gui-based Hex editor, and its pretty easy to use even for someone like me who has no experience with editing raw binary files (*). It turned out to be very useful when I need to alter some Eschalon Book 1 save game files (more on this in a later post).

Still, GUIs are only so useful, and I had to use the command line "cmp" utility to identify the bytes that differed between two different save game files before I could actually do anything useful with Okteta. Another cool command line tool I discovered for the first time: "xxd." Long live the all-powerful command line!

(*) No experience with messing around in binary of unknown format. Binary files with known formats are easy to deal with, you just write a program to process them.)